Breathless

Rutgers Films in Print

Charles Affron, Mirella Jona Affron, and Robert Lyons, editors
My Darling Clementine, John Ford, director
edited by Robert Lyons
The Last Metro, Francois Truffaut, director
edited by Mirella Jona Affron and E. Rubinstein
Touch of Evil, Orson Welles, director
edited by Terry Comito
The Marriage of Maria Braun, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, director
edited by Joyce Rheuban
Letter from an Unknown Woman, Max Ophuls, director
edited by Virginia Wright Wexman with Karen Hollinger
Rashomon, Akira Kurosawa, director
edited by Donald Richie
8, Federico Fellini, director
edited by Charles Affron
La Strada, Federico Fellini, director
edited by Peter Bondanella and Manuela Gieri
Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard, director
edited by Dudley Andrew
Bringing Up Baby, Howard Hawks, director
edited by Gerald Mast
Chimes at Midnight, Orson Welles, director
edited by Bridget Gellert Lyons
L’avventura, Michelangelo Antonioni, director
edited by Seymour Chatman and Guido Fink
Meet John Doe, Frank Capra, director
edited by Charles Wolfe
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Don Siegel, director
edited by Al LaValley
Memories of Underdevelopment, Tomas Guitérrez Alea, director
introduction by Michael Chanan
Imitation of Life, Douglas Sirk, director
edited by Lucy Fischer
Ugetsu, Kenji Mizoguchi, director
edited by Keiko I. McDonald
Shoot the Piano Player, Francois Truffaut, director
edited by Peter Brunette
My Night at Maud’s, Eric Rohmer, director
edited by English Showalter
North by Northwest, Alfred Hitchcock, director
edited by James Naremore
The Birth ofa Nation, D. W. Griffith, director
edited by Robert Lang
The Maltese Falcon, John Huston, director
edited by William Luhr
Breathless Jean-Luc Godard,
director

Dudley Andrew, editor

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick and London

Breathless is volume 9 in the Rutgers Films in The continuity script and the original treatment
for Breathless first appeared in L’Avant-Scéne
Print Series
Cinéma, no. 79 (March 1968) and are reprinted
by permission of Jean-Luc Godard and L’Avant-
Scéne Cinéma.
The stills on pages 36, 45, 50, 51, 56, 57, 63,
Fourth paperback printing, 1998
67, 73, 79, 84, 91, 103, 105, 109, 116, 135, 142,
143, and 145 are reproduced courtesy of the
Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive.
Copyright © 1987 by Rutgers, The State
Interview with Yvonne Baby and review by
University Jean de Baroncelli, Le Monde (March 18,
All rights reserved 1960), courtesy of Le Monde. “I’m Not Out of
Breath,” Arts (March 1960) and ‘“‘But ‘Wave’
Manufactured in the United States of America
Adds Brightness,” Films and Filming (Septem-
ber 1961), courtesy of Jean-Luc Godard. “An
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Interview with Jean-Luc Godard’’ (December
Data 1962) and Luc Moullet, “I Want You. . . To Not
Want You” (April 1960), courtesy of Cahiers du
Breathless. Cinéma. Statements by Georges de Beauregard,
Producer, Raoul Coutard, Director of Photogra-
(Rutgers films in print ; v. 9) phy, and Francois Truffaut from Jean Collet,
Filmography: p. Jean-Luc Godard (Paris: Editions Seghers,
Bibliography: p. 1963). Review by Pierre Marcabru, Arts
(March 19, 1960), courtesy of Arts. Reviews by
1. A bout de souffle (Motion picture) Claude Mauriac (March 19, 1960) and Louis
I. Godard, Jean Luc, 1930— Chauvet (March 18, 1960), courtesy of Le
II. Andrew, James Dudley, Figaro Littéraire. Review by Gene Moskowitz
(January 27, 1960), courtesy of Variety. Review
1945- Il. A bout by Louis Marcorelles, Sight and Sound (Spring
de souffle (Motion picture) IV. Series. 1960), courtesy of the British Film Institute.
PN1997.A23 1987 791.43'72 87-4596 Review by Bosley Crowther (February 8, 1961),
copyright © 1961 by The New York Times Com-
ISBN 0-8135-1252-2 pany. Review by Stanley Kauffmann (February
ISBN 0-8135-1253-0 (pbk.) 13, 1961), courtesy of The New Republic. Ex-
cerpts from review (February 17, 1961), copy-
British Cataloging-in-Publication information right © 1961 by Time, Inc., all rights reserved.
Review by Arlene Croce, Film Quarterly 14
available (Spring 1961): 55—56, copyright © 1961 by The
Regents of the University of California; re-
printed by permission of The Regents and
Arlene Croce. Review by Dwight MacDonald
(July 1961) copyright © 1961 and reprinted by
permission of Esquire, Inc. Review (July 7,
1961), courtesy of The Times (London). Review
by Gordon Gow, Films and Filming (August
1961), courtesy of Brevet Publishing Ltd. Jean
Carta, “On Breathless” (April 8, 1960), cour-
tesy of Témoignage Chrétien. Charles Barr,
“A Bout de Souffle” (1970) courtesy of Henry
Holt & Company. Extracts from her essay, ““The
Graphic in Filmic Writing,” Enclitic (Fall 1981/
Winter 1982), courtesy of Marie-Claire Ropars.
Acknowledgments

I am deeply indebted to Laura Baratto

for clearing the way for this book at
the library, at the Movieola, and at
the computer. She was a model of
thoroughness and accuracy to which
I have labored to be faithful. Philip
Benz and Dory O’Brien helped with
translations while, in breathless sum-
mer, Brigid and Nell Andrew
groomed the final text.
 : 7
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 Contents

Introduction Jean-Luc Godard, “I’m Not Out of

Breath,” Arts, March 1960 / 167
Breathless: Old as New / 3
Dudley Andrew Films and Filming, September
1961 / 169
Jean-Luc Godard: A Biographical
Sketch / 21 Cahiers du Cinéma, December
1962 / 171
Breathless
Statements
Credits and Cast / 31
Georges de Beauregard, Producer,
The Continuity Script / 33 1963 / 175

Notes on the Continuity Script / 147 Raoul Coutard, Director of

Photography, 1963 / 175
The Original Treatment, Francois
Truffaut / 153 Francois Truffaut, 1963 / 177

Reviews
Interviews, Reviews, and
Commentaries Le Monde, Jean de Baroncelli / 181

Interviews with Godard Arts, Pierre Marcabru / 183

Yvonne Baby, Le Monde, March Le Figaro Littéraire, Claude

18, 1960 / 165 Mauriac / 184
Le Figaro, Louis Chauvet / 186 Commentaries

Variety, Gene Moskowitz / 188 Jean-Luc Godard, Luc

Moullet / 209
Sight and Sound, Louis
Marcorelles / 189 On Breathless, Jean Carta / 215

The New York Times, Bosley A Bout de Souffle, Charles

Crowther/ 191 Barr / 220

The New Republic, Stanley The Graphic in Filmic Writing,

Kauffmann / 193 Marie-Claire Ropars / 224
Time / 195
Filmography and Bibliography
Film Quarterly, Arlene Croce / 197
Godard Filmography,
Esquire, Dwight MacDonald / 200 1954-1985 / 235
The Times (London) / 203 Selected Bibliography / 239
Films and Filming, Gordon
Gow / 204
 Introduction

bi re. At >
<feera ee It
 Breathless:
Old as New
Dudley Andrew

F:. innovative films are hailed in their own day. Citizen Kane, Greed, and
Rules of the Game were recognized as exceptional when they appeared, but
exceptional in the sense of aberrant. Neither the public nor the critical estab-
lishment was prepared to pay them serious attention. On the other hand, most of
the “breakthroughs” that stud the pages of Variety every year end up as only
fads. Remember Easy Rider or the 1Am Curious films. Their novelty wears thin.
Breathless belongs to that very short list of films that stunned audiences in their
own time and continue to stun us today. Like Open City, it was recognized imme-
diately both as a sundering with the recent past, and as an absolutely apt expres-
sion of the current sensibility.
Such works are not generated in a vacuum, although I do not discount in
advance the role played by sheer creativity. In any case, propitious conditions are
required: the felt need for a new kind of film, the availability of models for
inspiration and direction, the existence of an audience to engage, if not welcome
the film, and of course the material means to produce it. Like most introductions,
this one sets a dramatic stage for the entrance of the artwork it announces. But
despite or because of hindsight, and despite the clarity that our filtering of his-
tory permits, we should never forget the fundamentally illogical eruption in 1960
that was Breathless.
In his long personal involvement with the cinema, Jean-Luc Godard calculates
that his first phase lasted from 1949 to 1960, that is, from his first encounter with
the film clubs of Paris until Breathless, a film he has always claimed to be the
4 Introduction

culmination of a ‘“‘decade’s worth of making movies in my head.’’’ His true be-

ginning as a “professional” filmmaker he would mark with Une Femme est
une femme in 1961. This year would also mark his growing estrangement from
the équipe at Cahiers du Cinéma (Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Claude
Chabrol, and Eric Rohmer are its best-known members) and the kind of cinema
they promoted. But before that break, Godard relished his status as a precocious
student of the medium, precocious and arrogant. Let us examine Godard, then,
during his amateur phase up to Breathless, taking it as an opportunity to see the
forces of culture at work in an intensely productive moment. A revolution would
occur with the ascendancy of Chabrol, Truffaut, and Godard in 1959-60, but
the struggle that climaxed then is to me more exhilarating than the short-lived
success of the New Wave. A well-known story, it is nonetheless so edifying
as to be worth going over again, this time with a single character in mind,
Jean-Luc Godard.
Today Truffaut stands for the sincerity of the Nouvelle Vague; Rohmer for its
cool intelligence. Godard, one might think, lit the fuse to set off this volatile
concoction. In fact, however, it was the young Truffaut whose famous “Certain
Tendency of the French Cinema” was only the loudest and smokiest bomb he
dropped in what became an incessant, nearly indiscriminate strafing of the estab-
lished film industry.” Godard carried the ammunition, admired his friend from
the sidelines, and soon tested out his own weapons. If, later, he would bitterly
scorn Truffaut’s softened militancy, one might hear in his tone the hurt of be-
trayal, as though his older brother had joined forces with the domineering father
both had conspired and rebelled against. The script of Breathless, we must re-
call, was a fraternal gift from Truffaut, flushed with the success of his 400
Blows, to his eager sibling. No matter what he did with that brief script, Godard
most likely was proud of its source.’ It had a New Wave pedigree.
Godard has never concealed the immaturity of his ideas in those years. Indeed
it took the pretentiousness of youth, his and Truffaut’s, to flaunt the idea of a
revivified cinema in the stone face of an even more pretentious establishment.
One finds in his writings and memoirs of this period a winning mixture of the
brash, pugnacious smart ass (proud of petty thefts from stores, from friends) and

1. Jean-Luc Godard, Introduction a une véritable histoire du cinéma (Paris: Albatros, 1980), 36.
2. Francois Truffaut, ““A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” in Movies and Methods, ed. Bill
Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 224—236.
3. Frangois Truffaut, in L’Avant-Scéne Cinéma, no. 79 (March 1968), 47—49, translated in this
volume.
 Breathless: Old as New 5

of the young romantic, dreaming of the purity of artistic expression. Poe, Baude-
laire, and Rimbaud were his models, and perhaps (uncredited) the medieval out-
law poet Francois Villon.
He could write without irony, “‘What is difficult is to advance into unknown
lands, to be aware of the danger, to take risks, to be afraid.” * Early in Breathless
Michel Poiccard walks by a movie poster that blares the same message: “To Live
Dangerously until the End.” Godard was obsessed by personal courage in life
and in art. Even someone as uncompromising as the Marxist aristocrat Luchino
Visconti came under attack for dressing up his mise-en-scéne, putting on airs,
relying on good taste when what was needed was “courage.” ° Courage—or the
appearance of it—he found, like so many people, in Ingmar Bergman. The
lonely Swede could show the whole French industry that, as Godard said,

The cinema is not a craft. It is an art. It does not mean teamwork. One is
always alone on the set as before the blank page. And to be alone . . . means
to ask questions. And to make films means to answer them. Nothing could
be more classically romantic.°

“Alone on the set as before a blank page,” Godard saw himself and the direc-
tors he admired as heirs to a literary tradition: “Tell me whether the destiny of
the modern cinema does not take the same form as it did for the belated partisans
of romanticism. Yes, with new thoughts let us make old verses.”’’ The cinema
with its images, visual rhymes, and editing rhythm would reinvent the old verses
of poetry. The surrealist Jean Cocteau had already shown this (Godard’s first
short was an homage to that poet). And the new thoughts expressed in this au-
thentic language would be the thoughts of the age. Cinema would respond to the
traditional destiny of art by addressing its own era, not by emulating the past.
Here we come close to Godard’s central intuition, one I am sure he took from
Jean-Paul Sartre, the dominant moral presence in the Paris he inhabited. Authen-
tic art comes from sincere artists who extend the sacred tradition only when they
forget tradition and forge the present with contemporary tools of expression.
Every true thought must be reinvented or else it lies dead on the library shelf.
Citing Sartre, Godard says that cinema is the medium where “reticence, as it
were, is unable to hide its secrets; the most religious of arts, it values man above

4. Jean-Luc Godard, Godard on Godard, ed. Tom Milne (New York: Viking, 1972), 80.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., 76.
7. Ibid., 28.
6 Introduction

the essence of things and reveals the soul within the body.” * And so, ingenuously,
he can compare Nicholas Ray to Goethe:
Bitter Victory [is] a kind of Wilhelm Meister 1958. No matter. It would
mean little enough to say that Bitter Victory is the most Goethian of films.
What is the point of redoing Goethe, or of doing anything again—Don
Quixote or Bouvard et Pécuchet, J’accuse or Voyage au bout de la nuit—
since it has already been done? . . . There was theater (Griffith), poetry
(Murnau), painting (Rossellini), dance (Eisenstein), music (Renoir). Hence-
forth there is cinema. And the cinema is Nicholas Ray.’
In the auteur idiom of the day he absolved Ray from an earlier failure, Hot Blood,
by blaming the weakness of the script, and appealing again to literature and what
it might have offered him instead.
Nicholas Ray is morally a director, first and foremost. This explains the fact
that in spite of his innate talent and obvious sincerity, a script which he does
not take seriously will remain superficial. . . . No one who shares my opin-
ion that D. H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent is the most important novel of
the 20th century will be surprised when I say that here, had he so chosen,
Nicholas Ray could have found a subject even more modern in its overtones
than the ones he prefers."
The subject of The Plumed Serpent, we might note, concerns someone who, like
Michel Poiccard, “‘weary of adventure, returns to the people to whom he
belongs.”
In other places Godard claims that Joseph Mankiewicz is the reincarnation of
the famous French playwright Jean Giraudoux and that his script for The Quiet
American is superior to its source, Graham Greene’s celebrated novel.'' Thus the
cinema need not feel inferior. It will have its Stendhal and its Proust; though, he
concludes, in order to be faithful to our epoch and this new art, cinéastes must
drive beyond the intelligence of such authors and “‘go for the instant.”
From the very outset Godard was certain that the defining characteristics of
modern life had to be speed, boldness, and ingenuity. He was infatuated with
André Malraux’s early novels for precisely these qualities. He admired as well the

8. Ibid., 26.
9. Ibid., 64, 66.
10. Ibid., 43.
11. Ibid., 82.
 Breathless: Old as New 7

man himself, who left literature to take on a political destiny that must at first
have seemed to be of the same high order. Malraux reinforced his modernity by
filming L’ Espoir and by writing a key essay on the cinema. For Godard this made
him the prototype of the modern intellectual. He would echo Malraux’s philoso-
phy in his selection of Alfred Hitchcock as one of the most serious thinkers of
our time: Of Strangers on a Train (but perhaps already thinking of the movies he
himself would make) he said, “I know of no other recent film which better con-
veys the condition of modern man, who must escape his fate without the help of
the gods.”’
If any artistic expression were to be equal to this existentialist view of life, it
would have to rely on swiftness, chance, and reflex, forgoing the elegance and
even the intelligence of an earlier age. The modern-day cinematic Stendhal must
sacrifice precision, form, and clarity to render the vigor and anxiety of the age,
for our age is not Stendhal’s. Although he loved John Ford, Godard felt him to be
a cinéaste of an earlier aesthetic. ‘“The force of Ford’s camera movement,” he
wrote in contrasting the modern and classical western, ‘arises from its plastic
and dynamic beauty. [Anthony] Mann’s shot is, one might say, of vegetal beauty.
Its force springs precisely from the fact that it owes nothing to any planned
aesthetic.” '* Speaking not of filmmakers but of genres, he made the same point:
“Tf the emergence of American comedy is as important as the advent of sound,
it is because it brought back swiftness of action, and allowed the moment to
be savoured to the full. . . . It is pointless to kill one’s feelings in order to live
longer.” '* Michel Poiccard would utterly agree. When Patricia reads him William
Faulkner’s conclusion to The Wild Palms, ‘“‘between grief and nothingness, I
choose grief,” Michel rebuts: “Grief is a compromise. I’d choose nothing-
ness. . . . You’ve got to have all or nothing.”
What is so astonishing is that Godard routinely calls on maligned genres, the
Western and the musical, to help address the most serious philosophical issues of
the day. Indeed, he implies that the late twentieth-century philosopher, like the
writer, must work through the cinema or be out of touch with the problems of our
world. Naturally he is thinking of the existentialist philosopher. Sartre had at-
tended Bazin’s ciné-club during the Occupation, had written the first serious cri-
tique of Citizen Kane, and had worked on several scripts.'° In a 1953 address

[2 sibide 23:
LS lbide WLIO:
14. Ibid., 27.
15. Dudley Andrew, André Bazin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), esp. pp. 70—80.
8 Introduction

from the chair he held at the Collége de France Maurice Merleau-Ponty had
proclaimed that henceforth the work of philosophy and that of cinema were
parallel.'°
One might point to the question of ‘“‘authenticity”’ as the key ethical concept of
the era. It certainly was central to Godard’s judgments. From André Bazin he
learned to subsume this issue to the linked terms of spontaneity and sincerity. He
would attack his former ally Roger Vadim in the late fifties for having given up
spontaneity and intuition in the demeaning search for respect by aiming at calcu-
lated effects.'’ Godard preferred the immediacy, and even the bad taste, of the
American cinema. “I love the moment in Fallen Angel when the camera, in order
not to lose sight of Linda Darnell as she walks across a restaurant, rushes so fast
through the customers that one sees the assistants’ hands seizing two or three of
them by the scruff of the neck and pulling them aside to make way for it.” '* How
much this description is like Bazin’s review of Kon Tiki, which ecstatically re-
counts that moment when the cameraman must lay down the camera to help
defend the raft from a charging shark."”” The film, even in its blemishes and gaps,
is a true record of the scene, for here it visibly records the danger, the energy of
the moment in which it is engaged. ““Clumsiness,”’ Godard said, “attempts to fix
simplicity straight in the eye. It is not a mark of incompetence but of reti-
cence.” *° No film would try harder than Breathless to fix simplicity straight in
the eye. No film so joyously and cavalierly disregards finesse and technical com-
petence in the pursuit of direct expression.
While Bazin promoted the unique virtues of cinematic mise-en-scéne, virtues
that owed far more to the recording rather than the shaping powers of the me-
dium, Godard stands ready to turn to editing strategies when the frenzy on the set
fails to convey the turmoil of the plot, characters, or theme. More important, he
is ready to rethink the relation of editing to mise-en-scéne, hoping to go beyond
accepted strategies to describe more aptly (and in Breathless to produce) a dis-
tinctively cinematic pulse of energy.

In Les Mauvaises Rencontres {Alexandre] Astruc was still using this sort
of effect, this premeditated violence, in the manner of Bardem: as a shot
changed, a door opened, a glass shattered, a face turned. In Une Vie, on

16. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘“The Psychology of Film,” in Sense and Nonsense (Evanston: North-
western University Press, 1964), 48-59. Originally published in French in 1948 by Nagel (Paris).
17. Godard on Godard, 194.
18. Ibid., 133-134.
19. André Bazin, What Is Cinema? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 161.
20. Godard on Godard, 151.
 Breathless: Old as New 9

the other hand, he uses it within a shot, pushing the example of Richard
Brooks—or, more especially, Nicholas Ray—so far that the effect becomes
almost the cause. The beauty is not so much in Marquand’s dragging Maria
Schell out of the chateau as in the abruptness with which he does it. This
abruptness of gesture which gives a fresh impulse to the suspense every few
minutes, this discontinuity latent in its continuity, might be called the tell-
tale heart of Une Vie.”!
“Discontinuity in continuity,” a “heart” beating within an ‘“‘abstraction.’’ With
Une Vie we are, in 1958, almost at the New Wave. A new aesthetic has replaced
the tired cinema of quality that had dominated France with its prettified, in-
nocuous adaptations since the war. Truffaut finally delivers the needed push and
Godard, in one of his most quoted litanies, chants: “Les Quatre Cents Coups
[The 400 Blows] will be a film signed Frankness. Rapidity. Art. Novelty. Cine-
matography. Originality. Impertinence. Seriousness. Tragedy. Renovation. Ubu-
Roi. Fantasy. Ferocity. Affection. Universality. Tenderness.” ”
As Truffaut began actively making films, Godard leaped into the first rank of
the insurgents. Irate that his friend had won only the director’s prize, not the
Palme d’or at the Cannes film festival, he lashed out against the film that did win,
Black Orpheus, by Marcel Camus, that chic pretender to originality:
What would the “Concerto for Clarinet” be without Mozart? What would the
‘“‘Head of a Girl’’ be without Vermeer? [Louis] Aragon’s prose without Ara-
gon? What in short would Orpheus’ song (have you seen [Cocteau’s] Orphée
again recently?) be without Orpheus? Or what would poetry be without
a poet? Well, it would be Orfeu Negro. . . . Orfeu Negro is. . . totally
unauthentic.”
And the critical world agreed with him. He thought the whole world agreed. In a
shameless victory speech he announced a revivified film culture under the new
cultural minister of France:
The face of French cinema has changed. . . . Malraux [who confirmed The
400 Blows as France’s entry at Cannes] made no mistake. He could hardly
help recognizing that tiny inner flame, that reflection of intransigence, shin-

21. Ibid., 98. Juan Antonio Bardem was a noted Spanish filmmaker. His Death of a Cyclist was a hit
in France in 1955.
22. Ibid., 121. Ubu Roi, literally “King Shit,” is an 1896 play by Alfred Jarry that still represents the
ultimate in social and artistic rebellion.
23. Ibid., 151.
10 Introduction

ing in the eyes of Truffaut’s Antoine . . . for it is the same as that which
glittered twenty years ago on Tchen’s dagger on the first page of La Condition
humaine. . . . We won the day in having it acknowledged in principle that a
film by Hitchcock, for example, is as important as a book by Aragon. Film
auteurs, thanks to us, have finally entered the history of art. But you whom
we attack have automatically benefited from this success. And we attack you
for your betrayal, because we have opened your eyes and you continue to
keep them closed. Each time we see your films we find them so bad, so far
aesthetically and morally from what we had hoped, that we are almost
ashamed of our love for the cinema. . . . We cannot forgive you for never
having filmed girls as we love them, boys as we see them every day, parents
as we despise or admire them, children as they astonish us or leave us
indifferent; in other words, things as they are. Today, victory is ours. It is our
films which will go to Cannes to show that France is looking good, cine-
matographically speaking. Next year it will be the same again, you may be
sure of that. Fifteen new, courageous, sincere, lucid, beautiful films will
once again bar the way to conventional productions.*

Of course, the next year one of those fifteen films would be Godard’s. What kind
of film would it be? Godard may not have been sure of his subject, but he had
certainly settled on a style. It would be ““American,” with speed, reflex, and a
character who could go to the limit. In short, it would have directness and hon-
esty in theme and style, as opposed to the good taste (or what Godard felt was the
congenital mendacity) of the ruling French cinema of quality. The relation be-
tween aesthetics and ethics could be no closer than it was in 1960.
Godard was measuring spiritual depth when he reviewed films. The New Wave
was a club of distinction where a mentality of heroism prevailed and where it was
presumed that vibrant lives could produce only vibrant films. Great souls are
fashioned when a filmmaker’s drive toward originality is guided, but not ham-
pered, by tradition. The proof of this lies in the films themselves. And so Godard
confidently could propose Claude Chabrol as one of the elect. “When I say that
Chabrol gives me the impression of having invented the pan—as Alain Resnais
invented the track, Griffith the close-up, and Ophuls reframing—I can speak no
greater praise.” * Godard planned to invent the cinema in its entirety. He hoped
to do so even in his first feature, Breathless.

24. Ibid., 146-147.

25. Ibid., 129.
 Breathless: Old as New 11

Breathless is crammed with reinvention, as was evident to its incredulous first

audiences. The jump cuts were the most blatant celebration of technique, occur-
ring seemingly in disregard to the story, to the dialogue, and to the construction
of cinematic illusion. While they often excise dead time from a conversation, at
other times (as in shot 108 for example) they produce a pulse to the image and
nothing more, actually working against the scene they exist within.
Less remarked upon than the jump cut is what I term the technique of the
quick cut. Here Godard butts the image of a static figure up against one (often the
same one) in full motion. Occasionally the screen direction of the two shots will
be opposed to further jar the viewer, propelling the film in some cases or breaking
all sense of flow in other cases. When Patricia finally resolves to turn in Michel,
her trip to the café telephone consists of three shots (376—378), each reversing
her screen direction and the speed of her gait. Unlike the rapid flow of motion
that the New Wave taught Madison Avenue how to use in the stylish TV ads of the
1960s, Breathless stutters and spurts in scenes like this, jolting the viewer ner-
vously and unpredictably. The effect of the quick cut is heightened by other
contributing factors. Enormous changes in scale keep us off our guard, as, for
example, the extreme closeup pan of Michel’s revolver cut against the long-shot
figure of the policeman already in the act of falling backwards into the bushes
(shots 47, 48).
In contrast to such cinematic hyperactivity is the static wordiness of much of
the rest of the film, particularly the scene in Patricia’s hotel room that takes up
virtually a third of the movie. This scene contains numerous jump cuts, a few
quick cuts, and several closeup pans and tilts; however, its overall effect is to
establish an unusual duration in which lengthy pauses cushion sessions of the
incessant jockeying of the two characters. Godard endeavors to present in a single
overlong scene the formula of the Hollywood love story, confining it to one loca-
tion and forcing it to run its course in real time without the slightest interruption
from the outside.
The true antithesis of the jump and quick cuts is not, however, the film’s ex-
tended dialogue sequence but rather its extraordinary long takes. The first
promenade Michel and Patricia take down the Champ Elysées is justly celebrated
for its documentary evidence, but it is only a prelude to the tour de force of
camerawork displayed in the travel agency, in the Herald Tribune office, and in
the Swedish model’s apartment at the end of the film. In all three of these cases,
the camera weaves a broadly circular path 360 degrees or more as it follows a
main character, only to retrace the path with another character. Thus the dra-
12 Introduction

matic opposition of two characters is figured by the overlaying of one trajectory

immediately on another without a cut. These three shots, 85, 285, and 384, are
among the most beautiful and audacious in film history. They proclaim the track-
ing camera to be a moral as well as an aesthetic force, a way of seeing and
representing life that was born with the cinema and is reborn now.
Breathless directs its play and replay of technique along the line of a story that
may in itself be thought of as play and replay, that is, as fundamentally generic.
Since the cinema has always shaped itself into genres, and since Godard, for all
his belief in authenticity, doubts the possibility of radical originality, his first
feature models itself on that tradition. The theme of the film, like the essence
of its hero, is precisely the futile struggle to be original “in the manner of”
something or someone else. The notion of individuality and of forthrightness is
as American as the movies, and as fully processed. Since there can be no escap-
ing genre, since freedom is attainable only within or against genre, Godard the
cinéphile embraces it. And he chooses the genre that most promoted and prob-
lematized freedom, the film noir.”
Film noir was itself a marginal genre, almost an experimental one in relation
to the Hollywood system of the 1940s and 1950s. It spoke forbidden secrets
(murder, betrayal, incest) that continue to obsess film addicts. And it spoke them
in a murky way whose very indirection was a sign of its deeper, darker truth:
the mumbled dialogue, at times aggressive, at times utterly irrelevant; the spon-
taneous violence; the inventive sets and more inventive camerawork establishing
a space at once urban and psychological; the overly dramatic musical scores and
the abrupt sound cuts. Its contradictory tone, both hushed and hysterical, ex-
pressed unconsciously the existential angst of the times. The disillusioned young
French people who haunted the Paris Cinémathéque after the war felt that these
films spoke directly to them.

Even before Cahiers [du Cinéma], Bazin, Doniol-Valcroze, and others cre-
ated a ciné-club called Objectif 49 which showed film noir, like Gilda and
Fallen Angel. I thought of Mark McPherson, Detective [Laura] with Dana
Andrews also in it while I was making Breathless. . . . Fallen Angel and its
type became a model for Breathless.”

26. The French were the first to define and to admire this genre. See Raymond Borde and E. Chau-
meton, Panorama du film noir (Paris: Editions du Minuit, 1955).
27. Godard, Introduction a une véritable histoire, 25.
 Breathless: Old as New 13

Godard packed his film with direct and glancing citations to this genre. “I re-
member | had put in a poster of an Aldrich film whose subtitle was ‘To live
dangerously until the end’ simply because at that time [Robert] Aldrich was part
of our cinéphile references.” * A plethora of other such references quickly sur-
face. Belmondo’s ruse in the public toilet, for instance, where he pretends to wash
his hands before attacking the unsuspecting gentleman, comes directly from The
Enforcer (1951, Bretaigne Windust). Jack Palance’s name appears on the poster
for Ten Seconds to Hell (1959, Aldrich), just as Humphrey Bogart’s full photo
arrests Belmondo in front of a lobby card for Mark Robson’s 1956 The Harder
They Fall, a film about the lowlife of the boxing world. Belmondo, before acting,
had been a boxer. Now, as actor, he wipes his thumb across his lips mimicking
one of the authentic (unstaged) tics of ““Bogey” and then worshipfully he lives
out his life like an American gangster, slapping his pal Berutti on the shoulder in
greeting, sporting just the right style hat, keeping a cigarette constantly in his
mouth as part of his costume, and driving flashy cars. In the most ostentatious
reference to the genre, Jean Seberg runs right through a theater playing a film
noir in her escape from the clumsy “dick.” Although the screen is not visible to
us, the English dialogue is plain: Gene Tierney and Richard Conte in another
Preminger film, Whirlpool.”
The casting of Jean-Pierre Melville as the noted writer Parvulesco is a gesture
of dubious homage to the greatest exponent of film noir working in France,
dubious because his name is the Roumanianization of the Latin term for “puny.”
Nevertheless the savant holds forth, wearing in the film his signature American-
style hat, the same hat he no doubt wore on the set of Deux hommes dans Man-
hattan, a thriller he was filming at that very moment. Melville’s influence on the
whole New Wave is well documented. Godard is happy to acknowledge it in his
script. In an early scene the detectives pressure Belmondo’s contact, Tolmatchoff,
at the Inter-America Travel Agency, saying, ““Remember when you tipped us off
to your friend Bob? You're going to repeat the performance.” Michel has in fact
already learned that ‘“‘Bob’s in the cooler.” And he should have known it, for Bob
is none other than Michel’s prototype, a small-time gangster with plenty of style,
the star of Melville’s precocious 1956 Bob the Gambler [Bob le flambeur}.
Beyond such direct citation one feels everywhere the general “film noir tone”’

28. Ibid., 26.

29. Let me thank Marc Vernet for helping me identify many of the citations to American films. Craig
Sapir pointed out the particular relation to Gun Crazy.
14 Introduction

of Breathless. Belmondo’s dream of going south to Italy with his girl and his
swag recalls the “escape over the border”’ dreams of so many forties’ antiheroes,
like the fated couple of Gun Crazy, a 1949 film that displays one of the earliest
extended-take scenes in Hollywood cinema. This scene, a bank robbery filmed
entirely from the back of the getaway car, may very well have inspired the taxi
scenes in Breathless. Belmondo’s anecdote to Seberg about the bus driver who
stole a pile of dough to impress a girl seems to rewrite Gun Crazy, for that couple
too goes deeper into crime as their love grows. One can hardly forget, moreover,
that the director of Gun Crazy, Joseph H. Lewis, worked frequently for Mono-
gram Pictures, a specialist in this genre; this was the company to which Godard,
in a remarkable gesture of mixed homage and irony, dedicated Breathless.
The noir tone is equally sustained by the jazz score flamboyantly inserted in
unpredictable, though not arbitrary places throughout the film, and by the count-
less gestures of all the actors, including Godard himself who peeks over his dark
glasses and his newspaper before denouncing his hero. More than these individ-
ual moments, the film’s dramatic flow unmistakably recalls a whole battery of
films, all of whose doomed and passionate couples “live dangerously until the
end.”’ Gun Crazy is a B-variation on the theme eloquently initiated by Fritz Lang
in You Only Live Once (1936). Lang has always been one of Godard’s heroes. In
1962 the German master literally played himself in Contempt as a sophisticated
and moral filmmaker set off against an unscrupulous and crass producer, Jack
Palance. Breathless replays Lang’s perpetual theme and method in the dragnet
that closes around Belmondo. That net of plot might best be symbolized (in
Lang’s films as well as in Breathless) as a maniacal system of roads. The highway
where the crime takes place harbors no hiding places. One drives forward or is
caught. Later this narrow trajectory fans into the confusion of the metropolis
with its infinitely intersecting streets. Michel will be gunned down at last at one
such intersection, tired of running.
Three other driven heroes of the forties whose fate Belmondo wants to share
come from Raoul Walsh. In High Sierra (with Bogart, 1941), Colorado Territory
(with Joel McCrea, 1949), and White Heat (James Cagney, 1949) tormented
gangsters are cornered by the law and wiped out, leaving the audience to wonder
if this has been a merciless or merciful extermination. Critics of the time were
quick to note the attraction to death expressed by these characters.*° Godard and
Belmondo have made this urge explicit. Indeed, the filmmaker mentioned that
the whole interest of the script lay in the umbrella of death hovering above Bel-
30. Pierre Marcabru, review in Arts, March 19, 1960.
 Breathless: Old as New 15

mondo, one Jean Seberg refused, or knew not how, to share.*! Her ingenuous
question standing over Belmondo’s corpse, “‘Qu’est-ce que c’est ‘dégueulasse?’”’
is modeled precisely on Ida Lupino’s blank stare at Bogart’s riddled body in the
final scene of High Sierra: ‘‘What does it mean to crash out?” Both women are
fascinated by the death-drive of their men.
Because of this instinct for death and because of his complete alienation,
Michel Poiccard became, for certain French critics, a reincarnation of Sartre’s
Roquentin, Albert Camus’s Meursault, and Jean Genet’s perverse heroes.”
Breathless, after all, was a French film and one could search for cinematic refer-
ences beyond Hollywood.*’ Belmondo’s gestures may come from Jean Gabin, in
Marcel Carné’s Daybreak (Le Jour se léve, 1939), for both men measure out their
final hours chain smoking, often lighting one cigarette from the butt of another
and playing with the teddy bears of their winsome girlfriends. A more pertinent
source is Carné’s Port of Shadows (Quai des brumes, 1938). There, a deserter,
Gabin hopes to escape on a ship with Michéle Morgan but is gunned down in the
final moments, survived, like Bogart in High Sierra, not only by his distraught
woman but by a sad little mutt that has followed him throughout the film foretell-
ing his death in its yelps.
The film historian Georges Sadoul thumbed through his notes to find other
Gabin vehicles of romantic pessimism, linking Belmondo’s scene in front of the
movie poster with one in Julien Duvivier’s They Were Five (La Belle Equipe,
1936) where Gabin, out of work, stares at a poster advertising winter holidays.
Gabin in Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko (1937) is also a trapped criminal, though the
strongest rapport here would be between the Algerian detective Slimane and
Godard’s slimy detective, Vital (Daniel Boulanger), whose dull determination is
like the working of fate.**
This exchange between France and America follows what I believe to be a
historical pattern. Gabin did indeed initiate a strong, silent acting style in the
pessimistic films preceding World War II. He played out his roles on sets largely
adopted from German expressionism, but he restrained his own body, allowing it
to burst into anger once per film. He is the model Bogart would bring to life in
America during the war, passing down his reticence to Dana Andrews, Fred

31. Cited in Yvonne Baby, “Propos recueillis,” Le Monde, March 18, 1960.
32. René Guyonnet, review in L’Express, March 17, 1960.
33. See, among others, Marcel Martin, review in Cinéma, no. 46 (May 1960) and Claude Mauriac,
review in Le Figaro Littéraire, March 19, 1960.
34. Sadoul, review in Lettres Francaises, no. 828 (March 31, 1960).
16 Introduction

MacMurray, and the catatonic Richard Widmark. This is the tradition that comes
back to France in Breathless. If the moral stakes have changed, the position of
the character in society has not budged at all.”
What has changed, though, is the filmmaker’s attitude to this character. Walsh
and even Lang uphold, though do not condone, the established order their heroes
defy; Godard, however, not only backs his hero’s nihilism, but limes the film with
half-serious references to very serious artists. In the apartment where he spends
his last night, Belmondo picks up a Nouvelle Revue Frangaise book. It is
Maurice Sachs’s Abracadabra. Sachs can be thought of as a predecessor of Jean
Genet, a cultured gangster and defiant homosexual who was imprisoned before
his death at the end of World War II. More important is the para-reference one
can read on the book cover: ““Nous sommes des morts en permission [We’re all
dead men on leave].”’ This is Lenin. Godard, I think, is more interested in death
than in Lenin at this time, interested at least in clothing his hero with it. He
ostentatiously includes Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in the film’s final sequence
because, he once claimed, he believed (erroneously) that this was Mozart’s final
composition before his early death.*° Big thinkers find their way into the dialogue
as well: aphorisms about death by Faulkner and about love by Rainer Maria Rilke
add to the film’s philosophical aura.
Other references are made less ponderously, indeed so lightly that they glide
off the edges of the film. Paul Klee appears (via a postcard reproduction stuck on
Patricia’s wall) perhaps because he is, like Godard, Swiss. Dylan Thomas comes
up, it seems, only because Godard loved the title of his book, Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Dog. Godard allows himself this privilege his predecessors
never dreamed of, the privilege of arbitrary citation.

People in life quote as they please, so we have the right to quote as we

please. Therefore I show people quoting, merely making sure that they quote
what pleases me. In the notes I make of anything that might be of use for
a film, I will add a quote from Dostoievsky if I like it. Why not? If you
want to say something, there is only one solution: say it. . . . Moreover,
Breathless was the sort of film where anything goes: that was what it was all
about. Anything people did could be integrated in the film. As a matter of
fact, this was my starting-point.”’

35. My ideas concerning the history of this acting style come from Randy Wood, unpublished semi-
nar paper, University of Iowa, 1980.
36. In Baby, Le Monde, March 18, 1960.
37. Godard on Godard, 173.
 Breathless: Old as New 17

Naturally friends sneak into the film. Laszlo Kovacs, now an important cine-
matographer, lent his name to Michel as an alias, simply because Godard liked
the man and the name. Parvulesco draws on Cocteau to answer one reporter;
Patricia looks at Michel through a rolled-up poster. . . . a Renoir! This is a
double-citation, for the telescope may be Renoir, but the scene itself comes right
out of Sam Fuller’s Forty Guns (1957). Godard again strikes twice with the ques-
tion launched at Parvulesco, ““Aimez-vous Brahms?” His violent ‘“‘No” may be
read first of all as a rejection of Francoise Sagan’s novel of that title and second as
a condemnation of romantic music. Chopin is the next victim: ‘“‘dégueulasse”’;
whereas Mozart and Bach are both ratified. On the other hand, Patricia and
Michel do make love to Chopin and Sagan did originally author Patricia’s very
character, if we care to believe Godard when he claims that “Jean Seberg was a
continuation of the role she played in Bonjour Tristesse.” *
Godard, it seems, had at least two uses for intertextual references. The first,
stronger use, deepens the aesthetic and philosophical thrust of his own effort by
linking it to the low-art film noir with its excruciating ruminations about death
and love. The second use, paradoxically involving elite novelists, composers,
and painters, is textural rather than structural. Godard splashes these names on
his canvas to vary the tone and interest of his scenes, to keep his drama within a
live and lively cultural space. Just as he presumptuously (and wrongly) claimed
he was the first filmmaker to shoot on the Champs Elysées, bringing De Gaulle
and Eisenhower in as an international backdrop to a petty low-life melodrama, so
he thought himself the first to drop names like Renoir and Faulkner, the first to
show Picasso’s The Lovers, the first to play disrespectfully, because offhandedly,
with art. In the film’s most blatant fabrication of “culture”? Patricia and Michel
kiss long and lovingly in a theater where Budd Boetticher’s 1956 Westbound
is playing. But the voices we hear dubbing the English actors are not reciting
Boetticher’s script at all; they pour out poems by Louis Aragon and Guillaume
Apollinaire. Marie-Claire Ropars takes this moment as a key, not to unlock the
mystery of the meaning of the film but to open up her own playful dialogue with
the movie, using Breathless as irresponsibly and ingeniously as Godard used the
film noir.”
An older form of criticism might have wrestled some of these references into

38. Ibid. Actually Godard makes reference to several novels by Sagan in his film. See notes 26 and
48 to the Continuity Script. She was unquestionably the most popular author of the day, representing
the new youth culture.
39. Marie-Claire Ropars, “The Graphic in Filmic Writing: A bout de souffle or the Erratic Alpha-
bet,” Enclitic 6 (Fall 1981/Winter 1982), 147-161.
18 Introduction

an allegorical frieze. For instance, when Patricia explicitly calls on Shakespeare

and Godard provides a cutaway to Picasso’s drawing of the lovers, one might
suggest that Godard is rendering the cultural history of love, citing love’s greatest
literary source, Shakespeare, then its modernist reprise by Picasso, as criteria
for his own ultramodern version of love. But years ago Susan Sontag waged war
against this sort of interpretation, holding up Breathless as a film whose sheer
speed and casual structure must ridicule every attempt at a consistent reading of
its images. She proposed an erotics, not a hermeneutics of art.*° This spirit is the
one Marie-Claire Ropars has breathed as she dallied rather perversely with parts
of the film. Her goal, perhaps Godard’s goal in making the film, is the pleasure of
language and images, the pleasure of citation, contradiction, and feigned innova-
tion. This brings us to the aesthetics of pastiche where any element can lead for a
time. This film begs to be savored in parts.
Pastiche. Naive and optimistic about the cinema in this first phase of his ca-
reer, Godard felt he could incorporate the past in the elastic volume of a film
whose contours were arbitrary because conventional. He was sure of success
because in his iconoclasm and his posing he was as authentic as his hero. We
have itemized some of the numerous and heterogenous indices of culture pulled
into the vortex of Breathless. The spiral of that vortex is not Godard’s either, but
spins down to him from B-films and existential literature. What is original, what
can only be original, is the film’s energy. Citation, parody, homage . . . devices
that depend on the past . . . are thrust into a discursive moment and used in the
present tense. Breathless of all films insists on its presentness. Godard called
it “reinvention” so that everything would appear to be expressed as if for the
first time.
What makes Breathless a quintessential New Wave film is not a particular
technique or techniques but the energy with which it speaks. The French had a
word for this, a word once again made popular by Sartre: “‘authenticité.” At the
end of his first period of a life in film, Godard could maintain that optimism
about his medium that permitted him to incorporate whatever he wanted of the
past in a film which would mobilize those traces and thrust them into the future.
The lone auteur in front of the blank page, solitary on the set, wanders through
the storehouse of his memory in order to begin to write and to direct. When he
rubs his thumb across his lips, he means it.
Can we confidently accept in a postmodern work such qualities as “spon-
taneity,” “immediacy,” and “life”? These days innovative style is more likely to
99 66s

40. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York, Dell, 1969), 23.
 Breathless: Old as New 19

be thought of as a symptom of market forces than of authenticity. We look to

Pepsi commercials for the most ingenious discoveries in shooting and editing.
Even if our general cultural cynicism were not enough to put the significance of
Breathless in grave doubt, Jim MacBride’s 1983 remake of the film blows up the
issue of originality in its very project. In an intricately argued essay on both films
Pamela Falkenberg upends such notions as “original” and “realist” by turning
them into marketing strategies required in the capitalist film industry, where
every product must be at once new and reliable, different and the same.*! This is
as true of the art world as it is of pop music.
Both Jim MacBride and Jean-Luc Godard sought to overturn the current cin-
ema by getting outside it, onto the margins. Godard called on an older Holly-
wood tradition of B-films to help fashion the New Wave art film (because, in
part, the French cinema of quality against which he railed had consciously differ-
entiated itself from precisely those Hollywood genres like the gangster film).
These odd reversals are themselves reversed in 1983, when MacBride hoped to
rewrite “the commercial Hollywood cinema . . . through the rewriting of the
French art cinema.” * Both films acknowledge the need for mediation, for inter-
textuality, and forthrightly insist that the truth of any new cinema (New Wave or
New American) is not established by looking at life in the streets or in a director’s
psyche, but by looking at other movies, at books, songs, and representations of
all sorts.
Here we reach the necessary commonplace concerning Godard’s postmodern-
ism. Utterly opposed to the organicism and moralism of the cinema of quality,
Godard would deliberately emphasize the heterogeneity of culture, of its texts
and artifacts, and of its social organization. If literature is to appear in his films
(and it always makes many appearances), it is as a thing apart. The hard edge of
words confronts the engulfing image without being swallowed up. Literature
sticks out of Godard’s films, the way pieces of newspaper stick out of cubist
collages. In short, Godard incorporates literary material in the ongoing dia-
lectical purpose of his heterodox style.
Today Godard would say that “‘style”’ itself, even a heterodox style, is but an
element in an impersonal dialectic of enunciation. But in 1960 it was supreme,
the controlling vision capable of knowing what to throw in, what to cite, what to
invent on the spot, what tone to take, and so on. Godard now apologizes for the

41. Pamela Falkenberg, ‘Hollywood and the ‘Art Cinema’ as a Bipolar Modeling System: A bout de
souffle and Breathless,” Wide Angle 7, no. 3 (1985), 44—53.
42. Ibid., 51—52.
20 Introduction

flagrant individualism of Breathless, particularly in its glorifying of the freedom

of its characters or of the models they base themselves upon.*’ Today Michel
Poiccard, and even Bogart and Dana Andrews, seem less heroic, for they
achieved at best an incoherent and local freedom, whereas what is required,
Godard feels, is the systematic comprehension of social forces and contradic-
tions. We experience with Belmondo the excitement of the outlaw life, and the
greater excitement of indifference. Like his hero, the Godard of 1960 is an out-
law, throwing obscene gestures at the cinema of his day. In flailing about for new
directions, in escaping traps laid for him by producers, censors, the establish-
ment, he is both inventive and plagiaristic, inventive as plagiaristic. Belmondo
has his Bogart, Godard his Preminger.
Godard, we have noted, labeled his gesture to the cultural heritage “‘a cinema
of reinvention.” “ “To reinvent the cinema as though for the first time”’ is a phrase
that recurs like a refrain in his criticism of the 1950s. It is also how he described
his ambitions for his first film. What can this mean? First of all, it does not mean
that he feels capable of changing the course of cinema altogether, of pretending
that 1960 is 1895 and all doors are open. Reinvention means precisely the reap-
propriation of the history of cinema as one’s own: the authentic laying down of
the lessons of the past for the present. The iris that closes down on the distant,
confused detectives when Belmondo goes to find Jean Seberg is not a homage to
or citation of D. W. Griffith. It is the spontaneous discovery of the value of
cinematic punctuation. Godard’s pleasure in employing this technique is ampli-
fied by, was perhaps triggered by, the fact that the detectives are not seen directly
but as reflected in a movie theater door, and this only after Belmondo has had his
face-to-face exchange with a film noir movie poster. We who have entered the
theater after ogling production stills of Belmondo and Seberg must find our inter-
est deflected from the story of the chase to the mythology of representation, since
the detectives become in effect framed behind glass, another paper-thin publicity
photo promising whatever it is that the movies can deliver. Breathless is an at-
tempt to fulfill that promise in its own terms.

43. Godard, Introduction a une véritable histoire, 29.

44. Godard on Godard, 173.
 Jean-Luc Godard
A Biographical Sketch

B:- in Paris in 1930 into an upper-crust Swiss family, Jean-Luc Godard

spent his formative years in Geneva, capital city of capitalism. The rest of
his life he has spent fighting that background, criticizing the ideas that
underpin it and then criticizing his own critical stance. By his own account, life
seriously began for him in 1948 when he left Switzerland for the vibrant culture
of Paris. This was the era of existentialist cafés and of burgeoning ciné-clubs,
and Godard spent far more time at these locations than at the Sorbonne where he
was ostensibly pursuing a degree in ethnology. Here begins what he calls his first
phase of life with the cinema, a phase that lasted a dozen years through the
production of Breathless.
The days and nights he spent with Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jacques
Rivette, and Eric Rohmer at Henri Langlois’s Cinémathéque are fabled: a thou-
sand films viewed a year is the estimate, if you include films seen at commercial
theaters. In 1949 he crashed the Biarritz festival with the blessing of its indulgent
master of ceremonies, Jean Cocteau. The next year he helped start the short-lived
Gazette du Cinéma edited by Rohmer. Soon he was writing reviews, under the
pseudonym Hans Lucas, for Cahiers du Cinéma, perhaps because its founding
editor, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, was a family friend. In short, he insinuated
himself deeply into a cinema subculture that was already making waves.
From 1953 to 1956 Godard was less visible. Family problems took him back to
Switzerland, where, it is rumored, he got in trouble with the law for theft. When
in Paris, he kept up his relations with Truffaut and through him struck up a
22 Introduction

friendship with Roberto Rossellini. A job at Twentieth Century-Fox in Paris,

secured for him by Chabrol, led him to the producer Georges de Beauregard.
Meanwhile he completed a few short films and prepared a number of scripts.
After Truffaut’s success, Beauregard was willing to take a chance on his friend as
director of Breathless, no doubt because the film project stemmed from a treat-
ment by Truffaut and because Chabrol agreed to be assistant director. The recep-
tion of this film was utterly sensational.
Godard’s second phase began when he awoke suddenly as a director of promise
with resources. It ended in 1968 during the political manifestations in France.
During those eight years, he produced fourteen features and five shorts, ranging
in genre from musical comedy (Une Femme est une femme) to Brechtian allegory
(Les Carabiniers). An international audience awaited each new production for
the inevitable surprise it would bring. And they had not long to wait. There was
the bizarre science-fiction detective film, Alphaville; the mock homage to the
gangster genre, Band of Outsiders; and the lush Cinemascope Contempt, an
expensive production featuring Brigitte Bardot, Jack Palance, and Fritz Lang.
Increasingly there was the use of the cinematic essay format. This would be
Godard’s central contribution. Already in 1962 with My Life to Live he addressed
his audience directly, confronting them with sociological facts, with the dis-
course of a philosopher (Brice Parain), and with a drama brutally dissected into a
dozen tableaux, labeled as such. The topic? Prostitution. Prostitution and acting,
for the film starred his wife Anna Karina and included, as one of its tableaux, her
watching tearfully the great actress Falconetti in Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc.
In 1965 he would divorce Karina, only to marry another of his actresses, Anne
Wiazemsky, two years later. His turbulent domestic and political life is evident in
Masculine/Feminine, which pitted Jean-Pierre Léaud against his bubble-gum
singer of a girlfriend. Léaud’s search for sincerity in modern Paris is both tragic
and revealing.
With The Married Woman, Made in U.S.A., and Two or Three Things I Know
about Her Godard’s sociological inquiries became less personal. He freely inter-
cut small dramatic vignettes with sociological statistics, random shots of adver-
tising posters, and cosmic speculation, concluding one film with an immense
closeup of a coffee cup framed so that the bubbles whirling in the black liquid
appeared like great galaxies. Such aesthetic improvisation took its toll, annoying
those critics who had been partisans of his early inventiveness. The fact that he
shot the latter two films simultaneously (one in the morning, one in the after-
 Biographical Sketch 23

noon) provoked doubts about the seriousness of his work or at least about the
nature of cinema as an art form.
But Godard did not hesitate to go further. Beyond sociology was the political
film and with La Chinoise he fashioned an unforgettable discourse on Vietnam
and international capitalism. Weekend did not just investigate French bourgeois
society; it satirized it, assaulted it, predicting and demanding its demise. He was
indisputably arrogant and successful, even if he had left a large number of sup-
porters behind.
Having relentlessly riddled the modern world and its cinema during his second
phase, Godard next turned the gun on himself. The autocriticism implied in a
film like Le Gai Savoir is often overlooked because of the coincidence of its
production with the great uprisings in 1968. Certainly this is a militant film, but
it militates less against its culture than against the cinema that represents that
culture, including the arrogant art films Godard had made his name with. Sitting
against a black background, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Berto carry on a dia-
logue about language, image, and truth that in its minimal form criticizes spec-
tacle and demands a cinema of personal and political honesty. While editing this
film, Godard involved himself in the campaign to save Henri Langlois from being
deposed as head of the Cinémathéque, an early skirmish in what became a cul-
tural civil war. Godard was at the forefront of the manifestations closing the
Cannes film festival, although his participation in the clashes in Paris in late May
was token.
In any case, whether as part of the general upheaval of that year or because of
a dead end he sensed in his earlier work, Godard vowed to rethink completely the
cinema, to refuse, for example, conventional production and distribution mecha-
nisms, all of which he felt were completely compromised. In other words, he
took his own corpus as nothing more than the response of a bourgeois intellectual
to bourgeois culture, a response that, while critical, helped both him and the
system to prosper. With Jean-Pierre Gorin he formed the so-called Dziga Vertov
group, named after the revolutionary Soviet documentarist and dedicated to the
use of cinema for directly political aims. The austerity of Le Gai Savoir was
already a start in this direction. Next came his Sympathy for the Devil, where he
seemed to take pleasure in frustrating and alienating not only the Rolling Stones,
its subject, but most of their fans. Godard seemed glad to have retreated out of
the spotlight so that he and Gorin could devote themselves to inexpensive, but
“politically correct” projects often shot on alternative formats (8mm, 16mm,
24 Introduction

and then video). Wind from the East, for example, was co-scripted by German
revolutionary Daniel Cohn-Bendit. The last film of this phase, Vladimir and
Rosa, found Godard pleased with its negligible reception, for this made him
confident that he had avoided the temptations of entertainment and pleasure in
his quest to attack the system completely from the outside.
Future critics may be able to make fine distinctions in his career, but Godard’s
last phase has generally been treated as beginning in 1972 with Tout va bien, a
film that, rather like Contempt, stands apart because it employs spectacle and a
big budget. Starring Jane Fonda and Yves Montand, this political fable was made
with all the cinematic resources at Godard’s command, a heroic, though failed
attempt to address and convince a mass audience. After this, without giving up
the Maoism that dominated his thinking, he begin again to explore the medium
that had been his first love. Paradoxically, this exploration took him to television.
In Switzerland, Sweden, and France he was given an opportunity to experiment
with video. This work, examples of which have recently traveled across the
United States, is provocative and inventive. Its consequences are only beginning
to be felt in the world of video.
As for the cinema, Godard reconquered his lost audience to a large extent with
Everyman for Himself, Prénom Carmen, Passion, Hail Mary, and Detective.
While his political concerns are evident in the iconoclasm of the scripts and in
the way he oversteps every norm, none of these films can be described as a tract.
Each is interested in exploring the limits of cinematic representation, reflecting
en route on music, painting, and acting, as well as on color, space, and editing.
His films continue to be troubling, exasperating, and yet eagerly anticipated by
almost everyone interested in the cinema. If his need to overturn everything
around him has made many suspicious of his politics, allowing them to describe
it as whimsical, irresponsible, and self-serving, these same qualities have served
him well in the cinema, at least to the extent of allowing him to remain a crucial
figure throughout the full thirty years he has been making films. This past year
Cahiers du Cinéma published his immense collected writings. Godard has begun
to summarize his life. It is important to remember that throughout all his phases,
adhesions, and doubts, he considers himself a man of the cinema, in fact a man
whose life and memory span the century of cinema. The history of the cinema is
in his head, he claims. He is now seeing the doubtful future of this medium wind
down, like himself, with the century.
Breathless
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 Breathless

ne of the liberating features of The French versions agree closely

Qn was the break it with each other and with the English
made with standard production subtitled prints. Three small depar-
routines. No complete script was pre- tures are marked in the notes. These
pared before shooting. Godard im- have to do with the opening title
provised on ideas provided him in the credit, with a missing fragment in the
treatment that Truffaut had given him English print, and with what appears
(reprinted in this volume). Conse- to be an alternative bit of dialogue in
quently there exists no authoritative one scene. But overall, I am confident
shooting script for the film. that the continuity presented here de-
The following continuity was pre- rives from the complete film.
pared from American release prints of Breathless poses several complex
the film. Several prints were consulted problems to verbal transcription.
to insure against an aberrant copy. First, the dialogue. I have completely
While no French copy was available ignored the subtitles on the English-
for inspection, two published continu- language prints. Although they are
ities were employed for verification. frequently excellent, there are enough
The first appeared in L’Avant-Scéne compromises and shortenings as to
Cinéma in March 1968. The second make them unreliable as a guide to a
was a volume published by Ballard in full rendering of the verbal portion of
1974 in their screenplay series. This the film. Michel speaks a highly col-
version contains photographs from loquial French that frequently gives
every scene. the American Patricia trouble. I have
28 Breathless

tried to reproduce the tone of his vo- changes that editing makes within
cabulary, much of which belongs to a single camera setup, often within a
the 1959 period and would sound single take. These JUMP CUTS are fre-
dated to a French speaker today. As quently subliminal; at other times they
for Patricia, it should be recalled that are most apparent. The term QUICK
she has an extremely noticeable ac- CUT is reserved for those changes of
cent, that she employs a brand of camera setup (and therefore of shot
French that is quite often peculiar and number) that shock the viewer be-
sometimes completely ungrammati- cause they break the visual flow,
cal. I have not indicated her lapses, either through an abrupt change of
although in one scene Michel himself screen direction and size, or through
corrects the grammar of another char- a change from static to moving fig-
acter. Finally, an effort has been made ures, and so on. Two dissolves, one
to include all speeches heard in the iris, and a couple of fades complete
film, including those coming from Godard’s armory of punctuation. Un-
sources such as the radio or passersby. less otherwise noted, straight cuts link
This proved impossible in the confus- the numbered shots.
ing scene of Parvulesco’s interview, The camera distance is signaled
in the movie theater Patricia runs with the traditional abbreviations
through when chased by the detective, (ELS, LS, MLS, MS, MCU, CU, and
and at a few other points. ECU). POV indicates a shot obviously
As for the rest of the sound track, taking on the optical sightline of a
while few sound effects are noted (the character. Camera movements are de-
film being shot on location provides a scribed in the normal manner, though
normal ambient density), most music the reader should beware that a num-
cues are provided. Godard punctuated ber of scenes involve movements that
his film with major changes in music, are incredibly intricate, lasting sev-
some themes associated with individ- eral minutes. Here camera movement
ual characters, some with situations, really becomes the subject of the shot.
such as suspense or relaxation. I have pointed to a couple of these in
The visual track of Breathless is the description, but more often leave
renowned for its improvised camera- it to the reader’s memory or imagina-
work and its staccato cutting, both of tion to evoke the film’s visual prowess.
which complicate any attempt at shot An effort was made to divide the
breakdown. I have chosen to number overall film into a number of se-
the shots according to new camera quences based on location and time of
placements, listing as JUMP CUTS day. This should enable the reader to
 Breathless 29

locate a given scene readily. It also sought to distinguish the various parts
allows us to avoid repeating this in- of the city that this quintessentially
formation with every shot. Finally, Parisian film uses. One could ob-
Breathless, among other things, is viously go further in this, noting the
a toybox of cultural artifacts. Names, precise location of most of the scenes.
objects, locations, signs, and so forth One of the innovations of Breath-
are woven through it and give it much less was the suppression of credits.
of its density and interest. I have ad- Only the title of the film and its dedi-
dressed this issue somewhat in my In- cation precede the first shot. In prints
troduction. Notes are appended to the subtitled into English, even the film’s
continuity to specify further the sig- dedication has been omitted. The list-
nificance of details that might be ing of Cast and Credits, then, is
throwaways on the screen. Following placed here before the continuity as
L’ Avant-Scéne Cinéma’s lead, I have a convenience only.
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Credits

Director Technical Advisor

Jean-Luc Godard Claude Chabrol

Producer Locations
Georges de Beauregard Marseille
Paris
Production Companies
Impéria Films, Société de Vouvelle de Shooting Schedule
Cinéma August 17—September 15, 1959

Screenplay Process
Jean-Luc Godard, based on an Black and White; 1 < 1.33
original treatment by Francois
Release Date
Truffaut
March 16, 1960 (Paris)
Director of Photography February 1961 (New York)
Raoul Coutard
Length
Camera Operator 89 minutes
Claude Beausoleil

Assistant Director
Pierre Rissient
Cast
Music
Martial Solal; Clarinet Concerto, in Patricia Franchini
the key of A, K. 622, by Wolfgang Jean Seberg
Amadeus Mozart
Michel Poiccard, alias
Sound Laszlo Kovacs
Jacques Maumont Jean-Paul Belmondo

Editor Inspector Vital

Cécile Decugis Daniel Boulanger

Assistant Editor Antonio Berruti

Lila Herman Henri-Jacques Huet
32 Breathless

Carl Zumbach Used car dealer

Roger Hanin Claude Mansard

Van Doude Informer

Van Doude Jean-Luc Godard

Liliane Tolmatchoff
Liliane Robin Richard Balducci

Other inspector
with brief appearances by André S.
Michel Favre
Labarthe, Jean Domarchi, Philippe de
Parvulesco Broca, Jean Douchet, Jacques Siclier
Jean-Pierre Melville (all filmmakers or film critics)
The Continuity Script?

The Port at Marseille, exterior, day

ib MCU: a newspaper, Paris Flirt. Michel Poiccard is holding it up, so as

to conceal completely his face. The front page of the paper features
a woman in a swimsuit.”

MICHEL (voice-over): All in all, I’m a dumb bastard. . . . All in all, if

you’ve got to, you’ve got to. Michel lowers the paper, revealing his
face. He wears a fedora tipped low on his forehead. Taking the ciga-
rette out of his mouth and looking around, he rubs his lips slowly with
the side of his thumb.

. As a foghorn sounds, cut to CU of a dark-haired woman about the same

age as Michel. She looks around and nods affirmatively to him.

. MCU: Michel looking left, puffing on his cigarette. He turns and looks
toward the woman.

. As in 2, again at the sound of a foghorn. The woman nods emphatically.

. MLS: a middle-aged couple getting out of their big American car. The
man sports a military cap.

. MCU: Michel glancing quickly and stealthily to the right.

. MLS: the woman walking behind the couple. She stops, turns, and then
signals while the couple walks on. She continues to follow them.

_ MS: Michel deliberately folding his paper. He nods in reply to the signal
and begins to walk left.

. LS: pan follows an old fishing boat chugging into the harbor. The pan
ends on the woman standing on the quay. She glances anxiously left.
34 Breathless

10. QUICK CUT to MS of Michel at the couple’s car with the hood up. Track
in as he begins to hotwire it. The car starts; Michel slams the hood.

Il. As in 9. MLS of woman, still on the quay, running toward Michel.

[2. MLS: pan of Michel from inside the car as he opens the door and Slides
into MS behind the wheel. He rolls down the driver’s window as the
woman approaches and leans in.

WOMAN (placing her arm on his shoulder): Michel, take me along.

MICHEL: What time is it?
WOMAN: Ten to eleven.
MICHEL: No. Ciao! (He turns his head around to look out the rear
window as he backs the car up, looking just off the camera axis as he
does so.) Now I’m off [je fonce] . . . Alphonse!* Violin music and
dissolve.

National Highway, exterior, day

13: POV shot of a tree-lined rural highway from the car.

MICHEL (off, singing to himself): La, la, la, la. . . Buenas noches
mi amor.

14. MS: Michel from the rear seat of the car. He turns to look at a car
following him.

MICHEL: He'll never pass me in that boat. He turns his head for-
ward again.

LD. POV of car ahead.

MICHEL (off, singing to himself, across shots 15-18, cut in quick succes-
sion): Pa... Pa... Papapa... Pa... . tricia! Patricia!

16. POV of a BP oil truck to his right as he passes it.

Lie POV of acar as he passes.

 Breathless 35

18. POV of an old truck as he speeds past it.

19: CU: Michel’s right profile. His theme, first heard over the main title,
returns.

20. POV of the road ahead of him as he passes another car.

MICHEL: First I'll pick up the dough . . . (A car horn sounds.) . . . then
I ask Patricia—yes or no . . . and then—buenas noches, mi amor!
(He begins to sing again.) Milan, Genoa, Rome. (He speeds past
all traffic.)

ois QUICK CUT on blaring horn to Ls pan of his car speeding down the left-
hand side of a two-lane road. The camera follows from the roadside until
the car disappears in the distance.

Ze. MCU: Michel from the back.

MICHEL: It’s pretty, the country. He looks around, reaches down, and
turns on the radio.
RADIO VOICE (singing): His life. . .

2S POV from the passenger's seat of the passing countryside.

MICHEL (off): I love France!

24. MCU: Michel’s profile. He turns to his right to look straight at the camera
and says:

MICHEL: If you don’t like the sea . . . (Glances back at the road, then
back to the camera.) . . . and you don’t care for the mountains. . .
(Glances at the road, then back again.) . . . and don’t like the big city
either . . . (Glances at road and then into the camera.) . . . go fuck
yourself!

JUMP CUT and pan to POV of the roadside.

MICHEL (off): Aha! A couple of dolls hitchhiking.

36 Breathless

Pan back to Michel.

2a QUICK CUT to a CU profile.

MICHEL: Right, I’ll stop and charge a kiss a mile.

26. POV shot of the two hitchhikers, looking at Michel and the camera as his
car approaches and slows.

MICHEL: The short one looks okay. She has cute thighs. Yes, but the
other one! Oh no!

POV pan continues, now out the side and back windows as the car
accelerates past them.
 Breathless 37

Ped CU: Michel, looking out the back window.

MICHEL: Oh! Really, shit! They’re both too ugly.

The music stops. He reaches down and changes the station on the radio.

RADIO VOICE (singing): . . . talking of love. . .

28. JUMP CUT and pan to Ms of his hand going into the glove compartment
where he finds a gun. Michel’s theme music plays.

MICHEL (picking up the gun): Hey, hey, hey!

29. JUMP CUT £0 his hand with the gun on the steering wheel. He mimes
shooting out the windshield, then at a car coming toward him. He makes
his own sound effects for the gun.

MICHEL: Pow! Pow! Pow!

30. JUMP CUT to a closer shot of Michel with gun.

MICHEL: Lovely sunshine.

Pan with the gun as he points it out the window on the passenger side. He
pretends to shoot.

Si; LS: the tops of the trees going by with the sunshine coming through them.
Three genuine gunshots are heard.

oa MS: Michel’s back, and the road ahead visible over his shoulder. A slow-
moving truck is in the way and Michel’s impatience grows as the car in
front of him is afraid to pass it.

MICHEL (talking to himself ): Women drivers, completely gutless! Why

doesn’t she pass? Oh, yes! Shit, road repairs. (He drives past men
working, seen out the driver’s side.) Never use the brakes. And like
old man Bugatti said, cars are made to go, not to stop!
38 Breathless

33: MS: the car head-on from the grille down to the road as it pulls out.
Whistles can be heard.

34. LS: from the passenger’s seat, starting to pass the truck.

MICHEL: Shit, the cops!

32. LS: pan left of his car speeding by the truck.

36. Quick pan left (matched to 35) from inside the car to rear window,
showing the motorcycle cops chasing Michel.

Sie JUMP CUT. Still seen from the rear window, the cops are farther back
but now clear of traffic. Pan right to the front seat and Michel.

38. LS: very quick pan right from the roadside following Michel’s car as it
passes another car screen left to right, matching pan in 37.

Sik QUICK CUT fo LS: the cops in pursuit, speeding from right to left across
the screen.

40. QUICK CUT fo LS: pan of Michel pulling into a somewhat hidden area
off the road. He stops the car, tires squealing.

MICHEL: Oh! My clip’s broken off!* He leans out of the window on the
passenger side to look back at the road.°

41. LS: a motorcycle cop driving by on the road.

42. LS: Michel putting the hood of the car up. He hides behind it, then peeks
out at the road.

MICHEL: What a booby trap!

43. The other motorcycle cop rides by.

. As in 42. Michel fiddles with the wires he used earlier to start the car. He
looks up.
 Breathless 39

45. As in 41. The cop is pulling into the secluded area.

46. MLS: Michel walks over to the open window on the passenger’s side. He
reaches into the glove compartment for the gun.

CoP (off): Don’t move or I'll drill you.

47. ECU: pan starting with Michel’s hat, down to his elbow, with a JUMP
CUT to a pan along his forearm, wrist, and hand as he pulls back the
hammer. Another JUMP CUT to an even bigger ECU of the gun’s cham-
ber, panning along its barrel. The gun fires.

48. MLS: the cop falling backward into the bushes.

49. QUICK CUT fo ELS: Michel running across a field. Pan left with him
as dramatic music swells. He gets smaller and smaller in the distance.
Fade out.

Center of Paris, exterior, day

50. Fade in on Patricia’s theme. ELS tracking left to right along the streets
of Paris. The cathedral of Notre Dame comes into view as the camera
continues across the bridge toward Saint Michel. Michel’s musical theme
returns.

51. Ms: a car pulling into frame from right to left. Michel can be seen
through the side window biting his thumb in the back seat. The car comes
to a stop and he moves to climb out.

52. MLS: short track left to right with Michel as he enters a phone booth. He
deposits a coin and then doesn’t place the call. Frustrated in trying to re-
trieve his coin, he slams the side of the telephone. The music changes
back to Patricia’s theme.

53. LS: Michel buying a newspaper from a man on a bicycle. He begins to

read it while walking left. The music, which has restored his theme, now
stops.
40 Breathless

54. MLS: Michel coming out of a hotel doorway to address a man on the
sidewalk. A policeman passes between them.

MICHEL: Miss Franchini’s, what number is it?

MAN: She’s not in.
MICHEL: She does live here?
MAN (angrily): I said that she’s no longer in!

Hotel Lobby and Room, interior, day

55. QUICK CUT to MS: Michel at the deserted reception desk in the hotel
lobby. He leans back to make sure the man on the sidewalk isn’t looking
and reaches across the desk to grab a key. Jazz trumpet tune sounds as he
tosses the key in his hand and moves off right.

56. MS: Michel coming out of a bathroom wiping his face with a towel. The
camera pans when he walks right across the bed to an end table and
opens a drawer. Magazines are all he finds.

MICHEL: Girls—never any dough around!

Café, interior, day

57. MLS: an average café. Michel walks in and up to the counter.

MICHEL (to the waitress behind the counter): A beer.

He turns his back, leans on the counter, puts his hands in his pants
pocket, and pulls out some coins.

58. CU: Michel’s outstretched palm holding the coins. With his other hand he
counts how much he has.

MICHEL (off, to the waitress): How much is a plate of ham and eggs?
WAITRESS (off):A hundred and eighty.°

He closes his fist around the money.

 Breathless 41

59: QUICK CUT to MS: Michel turns back to the counter.

MICHEL: Okay, then, I’ll take one.

WAITRESS: Okay.

Michel takes a sip of his beer and then backs away from the counter.

MICHEL: I’m going for a paper. I'll be right back. He turns around and
runs out the door. The camera pans from inside the restaurant as he
runs down the Street.

Courtyard of Apartment Building, exterior, day

60. Match cut to LS: Michel running into the courtyard. He is carrying a
newspaper. Piano arpeggios play in the background. He slows and begins
to walk, opening the paper. Putting his foot on a railing by a stairway, he
buffs his shoes with the paper, then quickly tosses it to the ground and
jumps down the stairs to enter the building. A very brief tilt from the
doorway up the side of the building.

Small Apartment, interior, day

61. CU: a young woman’s face as she opens the door.

YOUNG WOMAN: Oh, 1a, 1a! Michel!

MICHEL (off): Can I come in?
YOUNG WOMAN (nodding her head): Yes. She opens the door to let
him in.

62. MLS: Michel shutting, then leaning against the door of the apartment.

MICHEL: How’s it going, baby?

YOUNG WOMAN (off ): No coat? She crosses in front of the camera.
MICHEL (crossing his arms): It’s in my Alfa Romeo Super Sprint.

63. MLS: the young woman rolling on her bed, searching for something
under it.
42 Breathless

MICHEL (off ): You want to eat breakfast at the Royale?

YOUNG WOMAN: No, I’m late. I’ve got to be on TV at 9:10.

. MLS: Michel leaning on his elbow against a shelf in her closet. He rifles
through her small purse. Glancing up at her, he quickly hides the purse
under something on the shelf and shuts the closet door.

65. MS: the woman now sitting up on the bed.

YOUNG WOMAN (looking down at her pajama top): Now I’ve torn it!
(She pulls a radio from under the covers and puts it to her ear.) Here it
is. She switches on American rock and roll, gets off the bed, and puts
the radio on her dressing table. Camera pans right with her and past
Michel who twirls in the center of the room and goes to sit on the off-
screen bed. She ends up by the closet and combs her hair, looking back
at him.

YOUNG WOMAN: What’s become of you? No one sees you anymore.

RADIO VOICE (very loud): It’s two minutes past seven o’clock.

66. MS: Michel sitting on the edge of the bed playing with a small stuffed
monkey.

MICHEL: Me? Nothing! Just traveling.

RADIO VOICE: Radio Luxembourg . . . (The DJ’s voice continues in the
background throughout the rest of their conversation.)

67. MLS: the woman at the mirror. Michel gets up and walks over to join her
in a two-shot.

MICHEL: What’s new in the neighborhood?

YOUNG WOMAN: I don’t know.
MICHEL: You don’t go out anymore?

JUMP CUT. Michel is closer to her.

YOUNG WOMAN: Sometimes! Sometimes to the clubs; but there’s

nothing there but jerks.
 Breathless 43

MICHEL (playing with the stuffed monkey): Still in the movies?

YOUNG WOMAN (sitting down at the dressing table): No, you have to
sleep with too many guys. . . . Enrico, recall him?
MICHEL: Do I recall . . . do I remember Enrico? Sure!’
YOUNG WOMAN (looking at herself in the dressing table mirror): I work
with him on TV . . . script girl.
MICHEL (opening her closet door and going through her clothes): In
Rome, in December, I was broke. I was assistant director ina film. . .
at Cineccita!
YOUNG WOMAN: You? She stands up and looks at him.
MICHEL: Yes, me.

JUMP CUT. Michel is now sitting on the dressing table, the young
woman on his right. She bends down a little to talk to him.

YOUNG WOMAN: You’ve never been a gigolo, by chance?

68. Ms: over the shoulder of Michel sitting at the dressing table looking at
himself in a hand mirror so that the camera catches his reflection in the
small mirror as well as in the large dressing table mirror.

MICHEL: Why? The phone rings.

YOUNG WOMAN (off): Just like that.
MICHEL (looking discriminatingly at himself in the larger mirror and
hesitating): Me, I'd like to, yes. He begins to make faces in the mirror,
which look like an attempt to stretch his face muscles or to convey
various emotional extremes.
YOUNG WOMAN (off, into the telephone): Oh, yes, call me in a few
minutes.

Michel rubs his lip with his thumb in his characteristic manner, then spins
when her reflection passes by him in the mirror.

69. Ms: Michel and the young woman. She is standing next to the closet with
her back to him.

MICHEL: And Gaby, is he back from Spain? He tosses the monkey and
catches it, while she looks at, and then puts back, a skirt in the closet.
44 Breathless

YOUNG WOMAN: He bought the Pergola.*

MICHEL: Oh, ya? (He stands up.) That’s great.

JUMP CUT. She is now at the wall mirror and he is next to the closet.

MICHEL (referring to the walls of her apartment): It’s stupid to paint ev-
erything black.
YOUNG WOMAN: No. She walks over toward him and then over to a
table on the opposite side of the room. The camera follows her, reveal-
ing on the wall the first five letters of the word “‘Pourquoi’ [Why]
spelled out with Gauloises cigarette packs.
MICHEL (off ): What’s written there?
YOUNG WOMAN: Pourquoi. (She takes a cigarette and lights it.) But I
never finished it. And now I’m smoking Luckies.

70. CU: Michel sitting on the edge of the bed with a cigarette in his mouth
looking down at something.

Th ECU: Michel’s hands holding an ashtray with a picture of a 1904 Rolls

Royce on it.

MICHEL (off ): You haven't got 5,000 francs to lend me till noon?°

ee cu: Michel and young woman facing each other in profile; he is on the
left. Their faces barely fit on the screen.

YOUNG WOMAN: I might have guessed.

Music from the radio can be heard in the background. She looks down
and then back up at him endearingly. He puts a lighted cigarette in his
mouth.

YOUNG WOMAN: Youre disgusting, Michel.'°

MICHEL: No, really, I'll give it back by noon.

AS LS: young woman walking to the closet to get her purse. Michel goes
over to the dressing table and sits on it. She opens her purse and looks in.
 Breathless 45

YOUNG WOMAN: Besides, I haven't got that much.

He takes out a cigarette and lights it. She pulls some money out of her
purse and offers it to him.
46 Breathless

YOUNG WOMAN: I have 500 francs if you want.

MICHEL: No, keep it.

She puts her purse away, then gets a dress off a hanger. They exchange
positions as she sits down at the dressing table while he has walked over
to the closet. He turns around and looks at her. Her back is to him. When
she has her dress over her head, he opens up the closet door, gets her
purse out, takes some money, puts it in his pocket, and puts the purse
back.

MICHEL: Well then, you’re not coming to breakfast at the Royale?

YOUNG WOMAN: No, I’m really late.
MICHEL: Fine. Arrivederci! He kisses his hand and touches the top of
her head with it, as he walks out.
YOUNG WOMAN (softly, her back still to him): Ciao, Michel.

Fade out.

Large Travel Agency, interior, day

74. Fade in. MLS: Michel leaning on a counter, facing the receptionist. He is
wearing his fedora, a sportcoat, and a different tie.

MICHEL: Is Mr. Tolmatchoff in?

RECEPTIONIST (looking up at him): Yes, he’s here, but he isn’t “in.”

Avenue Champs Elysées, exterior, day

75. MLS: Michel walks up to a young girl wearing a New York Herald
Tribune T-shirt and taps her on the shoulder. She is selling newspapers.

MICHEL: Is Patricia with you?

PAPERGIRL (in English): Yes. She’s over there.

76. Patricia’s theme swells. LS: the Champs Elysées.'' Patricia is walking
away from the camera. She is wearing the same New York Herald Tribune
 Breathless 47

T-shirt as the other girl and carrying a few newspapers under her
left arm.

PATRICIA (calling out with a definite American accent): New York Her-
ald Tribune! New York Herald Tribune!

The camera follows her at a low angle as she walks down the boulevard.
From off-screen right Michel walks toward her into the shot.

MICHEL: Are you coming to Rome with me? (Patricia stops and turns
around toward him.) Yes, it’s foolish . . . I love you. (He is now next to
her. She smiles at him and they start to walk together down the street
with their backs to the camera.) | wanted to see you again to know if
seeing you again would make me happy.
PATRICIA: Where are you back from? Monte Carlo?
MICHEL: No, from Marseille. . . . I stayed Saturday and Sunday at
Monte Carlo. I had to see some guy. Monday, I tried to call you from
Marseille.
PATRICIA: Monday and Sunday, I wasn’t in Paris. (Calling out in En-
glish.) New York Herald Tribune!
MICHEL: I'll buy one.
PATRICIA: How nice.

They pause. He takes some money from his pocket and gives it to her. She
gives him a paper. Then they saunter aimlessly on.

PATRICIA: What are you doing here, since you hate Paris?
MICHEL: I didn’t say I hated it. I said I have a lot of enemies.
PATRICIA: Then you're in danger?
MICHEL: Yes, I’m in danger. You don’t want to come to Rome with me,
Patricia?
PATRICIA: To do what there?
MICHEL: We'll see.
PATRICIA: No, I have a lot to do in Paris, Michel.

They have stopped walking and are facing each other, looking about.

MICHEL: And now, what are you doing? You’re going up or down “‘les
Champs’?
48 Breathless

PATRICIA: What are “‘les Champs”?

MICHEL: The Champs Elysées. . . . Me, I’ve got to go to Avenue
George V.
PATRICIA: Okay, Ill let you go.
MICHEL: Come on, walk with me.
PATRICIA: Only to the corner.

They now have turned around and are walking the other way down the
boulevard, this time toward the camera. Someone briefly walks in front of
the camera. Michel lights a cigarette and opens the paper he has bought.

PATRICIA (calling out in English): New York Herald Tribune!

MICHEL: I’m giving it back. There’s no horoscope. He folds the paper up
and gives it back to her.
PATRICIA: What is “l’horoscope”’?
MICHEL: The future. I’m interested in it. I want to know the future.
Don’t you?
PATRICIA: Oh, yes. (Calling out in English.) New York Herald Tribune!

The camera begins to track more slowly than they are walking, so that
they are now close to it in MLS.

PATRICIA: What’s wrong?

MICHEL: Nothing, just looking at you.
PATRICIA: Angry because I left without saying goodbye?
MICHEL: No, but I was angry because I was sad. (A man passes by them,
stops and shows something to Patricia. Michel shakes his head and the
man leaves.) It’s nice, not to fall asleep, but to wake up next to a girl.
PATRICIA: Are you staying in Paris?
MICHEL: Yes, I’ve got to see a guy who owes me money. After that, I’ve
got to see you. He puts his arm around her. They are now close enough
to the camera so that they are shot only from the waist up.
PATRICIA (taking his arm off her shoulder): No, better not.
MICHEL: Why?
PATRICIA: There are lots of girls in Paris prettier than me.
MICHEL: No, it’s funny, I’ve slept with two other girls since I saw you. It
just didn’t click [gazait] with them.
 Breathless 49

PATRICIA (confused by the French word): Didn't click?

MICHEL: They were very pretty, but it didn’t click, it didn’t work out, it
was sad! Well, then, you want to come to Rome? Me, I’m sick of
France.
PATRICIA: But I can’t, Michel. I’ve got to register at the Sorbonne.
Otherwise, my parents wouldn’t send me any more money.
MICHEL: I'll give you some.
PATRICIA: But we only spent three nights together!
MICHEL: No, five . . . (Pointing to her chest.) Why don’t you ever wear
a bra?
PATRICIA: Listen, don’t talk to me like that.

They have finally slowed to a stop.

MICHEL: I apologize. . . . What time is it? (Lifting up her arm to look

at her watch.) See you again in a little bit?
PATRICIA: (as he leaves from the foreground of frame right): Not in a
bit. This evening, yes?
MICHEL (off, in English): Yes. (In French again.) Where?
PATRICIA: Oh, here. She turns and begins to walk away from the cam-
era, but then suddenly spins around and runs toward Michel.

ee Blaring music. High crane shot over the boulevard. Patricia runs to Mi-
chel who is standing at the newsstand where he has bought still another
paper. Michel’s theme swells dramatically. She kisses him and runs off.
The music changes to Patricia’s theme. He walks away in the opposite di-
rection and the camera briefly pans with him.

78. CU: a portion of a movie poster that in French reads: “‘To live danger-
ously until the end!” In the lower right-hand corner of the shot the names
Jack Palance and Jeff Chandler are visible.*! Michel's theme music returns
very loud and brassy as the camera tilts quickly down to catch him
walking into the shot from screen left. He continues down the street while
the camera pans behind him in Ls. Once again he is skimming a paper.
A young girl runs in from the left to meet him at the corner.

fee cu: the young girl looking up at Michel. She holds up a copy of Cahiers
du Cinéma."
50 Breathless

rm doe

" ye NS
GIRL: Mister, pardon me. You haven’t anything against youth?
MICHEL (off): Sure, I prefer old people.

She reacts as if she has been insulted.

80. QUICK CUT to LS: a car squealing around a corner. The car speeds to
the left as the camera pans right.

81. QUICK CUT to MS: Michel glancing left. He takes the cigarette out of his
mouth. He is wearing sunglasses.

82. LS: the car, which has now stopped. The driver gets out and looks at a
man lying on the ground next to the car. He has apparently just been run
down.
 Breathless 51

83. LS: four passersby, including Michel, who quickly approach the accident.
A man reaches down to feel the victim’s heart. Michel’s theme music starts
as he bends down and looks at the victim. He then gets up, makes the
sign of the cross, and walks away, retrieving the folded paper from his
coat pocket.

84. CU: a newspaper page featuring a picture of a motorcycle cop. JUMP

CUT to headline: ‘Police have identified the interstate killer.”

Large Travel Agency, interior, day

85. MS: Michel walks into the travel agency with the camera tracking him
frontally."* He goes straight to the receptionist behind the counter.
52 Breathless

MICHEL (to the receptionist): Is Mr. Tolmatchoff in?

RECEPTIONIST (pointing left): He’s at the air travel counter.

In a continuous movement, the camera smoothly circles to his left, so that

as he heads in that direction it stays with him in MS. He casually makes
his way over to Tolmatchoff who is behind another counter. The shot wid-
ens by tracking behind Michel to include both the men.

TOLMATCHOFF: Hello, amigo!

MICHEL: Hello, kid!
TOLMATCHOFF: It was you who stopped by at ten o’clock?
MICHEL: I came for my money, yes.
TOLMATCHOFF: It’s there. Come on.

During the conversation the camera tracks from Michel’s left to his right,
reversing the movement it had made earlier at the receptionist’s desk.
Neither hesitating nor slowing, it seems to lead Michel back in the direc-
tion he had come. He is in MSs again when he meets Tolmatchoff who has
come from behind the counter to join him. Together they wander down the
lobby. Tolmatchoff has his arm around Michel, who is still wearing his
sunglasses.

TOLMATCHOFF: How’s it going?

MICHEL: Got bored on the Riviera. I came to see a girl. And you?
TOLMATCHOFF: Me, I’m going to hit bottom here. I’m beginning to get
rusty.
MICHEL: Better rusty than dusty.

They laugh. Tolmatchoff removes his arm from Michel’s shoulder. As they
enter a large room, the camera tracks left and pulls back to a MLS,
revealing a large counter with several clerks behind it.

TOLMATCHOFF: It’s there. (To clerk.) Do you have the envelope that I
gave you? (The clerk hands him an envelope.) Tolmatchoff takes the
envelope, turns from the counter, and walks toward Michel. As he does
this the camera circles around until it is in front of them once more as
 Breathless 53

they walk back. He hands the envelope to Michel as they leave the
room. Michel looks at the envelope, opens it, and takes out a check.
MICHEL (slamming the back of his hand against the check): The idiot!
Why did he mark it for deposit only?
TOLMATCHOFF (pointing to the check): | don’t know. Endorse it. But not
to me. (Tolmatchoff takes the envelope and crunches it up while Michel
folds up the check and puts it in his breast pocket.) 1 bet everything at
the track on Sunday. I’ve nothing left.
MICHEL: And your friend Bob Montagné, he could cash it for me.
TOLMATCHOFF: He’s in the cooler, the idiot! °
MICHEL: No joke? There’s Berruti too, but I don’t trust him.
TOLMATCHOFF: I thought he was your pal.
MICHEL: Has he returned from Tunis?
TOLMATCHOFF: Yes, I saw him yesterday. He was hanging around
Montparnasse last night.

A voice from off-screen calls for Tolmatchoff. He turns and leaves to go

back to his desk, indicating that Michel should meet him there. The
camera stays with Michel as at the beginning of this lengthy shot.

MICHEL (to the off-screen Tolmatchoff as he approaches the counter):

What’s his number, now?

Once more the camera circles left to right at Tolmatchoff’s desk so that
Tolmatchoff slides into view.

TOLMATCHOFF: Elysée 99-84.

MICHEL: Can I call him from here?
TOLMATCHOEFF: Go ahead. (Michel dials.) Who’s the girl you came
to see?
MICHEL: A New Yorker.
TOLMATCHOFF: Pretty?

The camera has circled 180 degrees around Michel, stopping on his right
side as he faces Tolmatchoff in a medium two-shot.
54 Breathless

MICHEL: She’s cute. I like her. (Into the phone.) Hello? Elysée 99—84?'°
May I speak with Antonio? Oh, well. No, no, I’ll call back later. (He
hangs up the phone and starts to leave. Then, to Tolmatchoff.) He isn’t
there. I’ll find someone else. See you later, kid.
TOLMATCHOFF: Ciao, amigo!

Michel’s theme starts. The camera tracks left again with Michel as he
goes out the door. Through the large window next to the door two detec-
tives can be seen walking up the sidewalk. They pass by Michel as they
enter the building.

86. MLS: the two detectives at the receptionist’s desk. The older detective
shows the receptionist his badge, while the younger one stands behind
him. The older detective is Inspector Vital.

VITAL: Inter-America Agency?

RECEPTIONIST: Yes, that’s right.
VITAL: You have clients who have their mail sent here?
RECEPTIONIST: Yes.
VITAL: Do you know a certain Michel Poiccard?
RECEPTIONIST (shaking her head): No.
VITAL (pulling his notes from his pocket): He also calls himself Laszlo
Kovacs."”
RECEPTIONIST (pointing toward Tolmatchoff’s desk): Ask the gentleman
over there. He’s in charge of that.
VITAL: Fine.

He puts the piece of paper back in his pocket and slowly walks toward
Tolmatchoff, his assistant following him. The camera tracks them both,
retracing its path toward Tolmatchoff who is now standing in front of
his desk looking over a model of an airplane. As the detectives reach
Tolmatchoff, the camera circles to include all three men in the shot.

VITAL (touching Tolmatchoff on the shoulder): Well, well, Tolmatchoff.

TOLMATCHOFF (nervously): Hello, Inspector.
VITAL: Organizing guided tours now?
TOLMATCHOFF: As you see.
 Breathless 55

VITAL: Remember when you tipped us off to your friend Bob?

TOLMATCHOFF: So?
VITAL: Well, you’re going to repeat that performance. Michel Poiccard
. . . (He takes out his piece of paper and reads from it.) . . . six foot
one, brown hair, former steward for Air France. He gets his mail deliv-
ered to the Inter-America Agency.
TOLMATCHOFF: I know him.
VITAL (putting the piece of paper back in his pocket): Has he been here
lately?
TOLMATCHOFF: No.

The receptionist passes by in front of the camera and the camera pans left
with her.

VITAL (to the receptionist): Miss!

She stops, turns, and walks over to Vital. The camera tracks back with
her, lining up finally behind Vital and facing her.

VITAL: Has anyone come to see Mr. Tolmatchoff lately?

RECEPTIONIST: Five minutes ago, a rather tall man. . .

The younger detective cries out ““My God!” and races for the door. Vital
follows him. The camera pans on Vital. As he reaches the doorway, he
stops and turns to Tolmatchoff.

VITAL: Accessory to a murder. Know what that means?

He hurries outside, turns left, and runs down the sidewalk. The camera
pans back to Tolmatchoff and the receptionist. She sticks her tongue out
at him. Michel’s theme music begins.

Metro Exit on the Champs Elysées, exterior, day *

87. MLS: low angle from the bottom of Metro stairs. Michel is once again
reading a newspaper while he casually descends the stairs.
56 Breathless

88. LS: the two detectives running to the top of the stairway. As they descend
out of view, the camera pans across the Champs Elysées, holds on the Arc
de Triomphe, then pans to the other side of the street and zooms in to re-
veal Michel coming up a stairway, calmly reading his newspaper. The
music stops.

89. MLS: a movie poster for The Harder They Fall with a large picture of
Humphrey Bogart on it. Michel walks up to the poster from the left and
looks at it."

MICHEL (mumbling to himself):Bogey. He moves left a bit to peruse a

display of stills from the film, staring at one picture in particular. He
takes his cigarette out of his mouth.
 Breathless 57

90. CU of a Humphrey Bogart still.

91. cU of Michel with cigarette in his mouth. Deliberately he takes off his
sunglasses and puffs his cigarette.

92. As in 90. Smoke from Michel’s cigarette flows in front of the still.

93. As in 91. Michel exhales more smoke, then takes his thumb and rubs it
from left to right over his upper lip. He puts his sunglasses back on.

94. MS: match cut of Michel walking off-screen right. The camera pans and
holds on the theater door as he passes. In the glass door of the theater we
can barely make out the distant figures of the two detectives who appear
confused and frustrated. Iris out on the detectives.
58 Breathless

A Paris Street, exterior, day

95. Black screen. Music comes up.

MICHEL: I saw a guy die today.

PATRICIA: Why did he die?
MICHEL: In an accident.
PATRICIA: Are you inviting me to dinner?

Iris in. CU: Michel’s outstretched palm with a few coins in it. He closes
his fist around them.

MICHEL (in English): Evidently.

96. Slight tilt up to a MS: Michel and Patricia face each other while leaning
on two parked cars on the street. Many people are walking by in the
background. Michel places the coins back in his pocket and straightens
his hat.

MICHEL: I’ve got to phone again. You’! wait?

PATRICIA: Call from the restaurant.
MICHEL: No.

They circle each other and switch places.

MICHEL: I'll be back in a second. He places his hat on her head and
leaves. The music changes to Patricia’s theme.
PATRICIA: The French always say a second when they mean five min-
utes. She smiles and takes a puff of her cigarette.

Quick fade out.

Café Washroom, interior, day

97. Jazz music. LS: Michel coming down a cramped stairway and through a
door to the men’s lavatory of a café. It is fairly dark, yet he still wears his
sunglasses. JUMP CUT inside the lavatory. He washes his hands at the
sink and as he is drying them an older, middle-class man comes out of the
 Breathless 59

stall at the far end of the room. Michel glances at him but then turns
away as the man approaches the sink. Michel walks over to a urinal next
to the sink and stands there. As the man washes his hands Michel peeks
out from behind the wall dividing the urinal from the sink. When the man
is finished washing his hands, Michel quickly comes up behind him and
knocks him out with a blow to the back of his neck. He catches the man as
he falls back and drags him back into a stall.”° Michel disappears for a
moment behind the door, then reappears backing out, locks the door, and
tosses the key on the ground. He then walks toward the camera while
going through the money he has just filched. He places the money in his
breast pocket and opens the door. The music stops.

Paris Street, exterior, day

98. MS: Patricia walking down the crowded sidewalk toward the camera. She
is carrying a white string purse in her left hand; her coat is over her left
arm. The camera pulls back with her as she walks towards it. From
behind Michel runs up and walks beside her on her right. He is carrying
a newspaper, still wearing his sunglasses and smoking a cigarette.

MICHEL: Where to?

PATRICIA (giving him his hat back): Anywhere. To Saint Michel.
MICHEL: Sleep with me tonight?
PATRICIA: I don’t know.
MICHEL: Why, you don’t feel good with me? He puts the paper under his
arm and plays with his hat.
PATRICIA: Yes, I do.
MICHEL (taking the paper out from under his arm): Just now, in France-
Soir, I read a news item. (Pointing to the paper.) Seems a bus driver
stole 5 million francs to seduce a girl. . . . He made out like he was a
tycoon. (A Jean Seberg look-alike walks by, glances at Patricia, and
goes on.) They went down to the coast together. In three days, they
dropped the 5 million. But there, the guy didn’t back down. He said
to the girl: “It was stolen money. I’m a poor slob, but I love you.”
(Patricia takes her sunglasses off and a man whom they pass on the
sidewalk stares into the camera.) But the best part is that the girl didn’t
drop him. She said: “I love you too.” They went back to Paris together,
60 Breathless

and were picked up burglarizing villas at Passy. She was keeping watch.
It was nice of her.
SOLDIER (to Michel): Pardon me, have you got a light?
MICHEL (handing him some money): Listen, here’s 100 sous. Go get
yourself a box of matches.

The soldier leaves.

PATRICIA (anxious, looking at her watch): Lord, I forgot. I’ve got to go.
I’ve got a date.
MICHEL: With whom?

A man passes in front of them, stares, then walks off-screen.

PATRICIA: A journalist, at the Champs Elysées, is taking me to a press

conference.

They have stopped, but the camera keeps tracking back to LS range.

MICHEL: Where? Now?

They begin walking again.

PATRICIA: None of your business. You’re . . . you’re really a nuisance.

They stop once more.

MICHEL: You're not staying with me then?

They begin to walk.

PATRICIA: I'll see you tomorrow, I will!

MICHEL: Not tomorrow, tonight, Patricia.
PATRICIA: I told you that it’s impossible.
MICHEL (putting his arm around her shoulder): Why are you so cruel?
PATRICIA: Where are some taxis? Irritated with him, she reaches up and
brushes his arm off her shoulder.
 Breathless 61

MICHEL: Right, fine, my car is at the Opéra. You want a lift?

PATRICIA: Okay.

They both walk off-screen left.

A Car Driving along Paris Streets, exterior, day

99. McU: brief shot of Michel taken from the back seat of the car he is
driving. Jazz theme with trumpet begins.

PATRICIA (off ): And your Ford, you don’t have it anymore?

MICHEL: It’s in the garage.

100. Mcu: the other side of the back seat behind Patricia’s left shoulder.

MICHEL (off): Right, then! I’m staying with you.

PATRICIA (turning toward him): Anyway, I’ve got a headache.
MICHEL (off ): We won't sleep together, but I want to stay by your side.
PATRICIA: No, it’s not that, Michel. (SUMP CUT. She fixes her hair,
staring at a compact mirror, then turns to look at Michel. Another
JUMP CUT fo a closer shot of Patricia.) Why are you sad?
MICHEL (off): Because! I’m sad.
PATRICIA: It’s stupid. Why are you sad? Is it better when I say “vous”
OF tial
MICHEL (off ): The same. I can’t do without you.
PATRICIA: You can very well.
MICHEL (off):But I don’t want to. (The music stops.) Look, a Talbot, it’s
beautiful. 2.5 liters.

JUMP CUT. Patricia’s face is suddenly blanched by light.

PATRICIA: You are aboy...

MICHEL (off): What?
PATRICIA: I don't know.
MICHEL (off): Patricia, look at me. I forbid you to see this guy. (JUMP
CUT cues Michel’s theme music, but the camera remains fixed on
Patricia.) Alas! Alas! Alas! (JUMP CUT shifts the lighting.) Here |
62 Breathless

am in love with a girl . . . (JUMP CUT. This and the following cuts
punctuate Michel’s speech like a litany. Patricia’s head remains in
precisely the same spot while the lighting and background keep shift-
ing.) . . . who has a very pretty neck . . . (JUMP CUT.).. . very
pretty breasts . . . (JUMP CUT.) . . . a very pretty voice, very pretty
wrists, a very pretty forehead, very . . . (JUMP CUT.).. . pretty
knees. . . (JUMP CUT.). . . but who’s a coward.
PATRICIA (not reacting at all to Michel): Here it is! Stop!

101. Ms: high angle of Michel from behind his right shoulder.

MICHEL: Wait, I'll park. . .

PATRICIA (off ): No, it’s useless. She leans over, comes into the frame,
kisses him on the cheek, and gets out of the car.
MICHEL: Fine, beat it! I don’t want to see you again! (He looks down at
the wheel, then left where Patricia has exited.) Beat it. (He hesitates
a few seconds, then speaks emphatically.) Beat it, you bitch!

Café-Restaurant on the Champs Elysées, interior, day

102. LS: Patricia walking past tables, pulling on her coat as she steps on an
escalator. Her theme music with trilling flutes accompanies her to the sec-
ond floor. The camera glides up, facing her in MLS.

103. LS: the second-floor interior. It is full of empty tables. The camera contin-
ues the smooth tracking motion of the previous shot, though now laterally
as it follows Patricia to a table where a man stands by a very large win-
dow that looks out on the Champs Elysées. A waiter converges on the
table at the same moment, removes a bottle, and leaves screen left.

VAN DOUDE (in English): Hello.

PATRICIA (in English): ?'m sorry, I’m awfully late.
VAN DOUDE (in English): Ah! That’s all right. Sit down.

Patricia takes the seat opposite him at the table. They both sit as the cam-
era continues tracking until it establishes a MLS on a diagonal from them.
 Breathless 63

104. As Van Doude speaks we switch to a MSs perpendicular to the table so that
the Champs Elysées is visible out the window.

VAN DOUDE (setting a book on the table in front of her, speaking in

English): This is the book I promised you.
PATRICIA: Thanks.

The waiter comes in and serves Van Doude coffee, then leaves.

VAN DOUDE (to the waiter, in French): Thanks. (Then continuing the
conversation with Patricia in English.) | hope that nothing happens to
you like the woman in the book.
64 Breathless

PATRICIA (taking her coat off, speaking in English): Oh! What?

VAN DOUDE (in English): Read it, you’ll see. Well, she doesn’t want a
child, but the operation is unsuccessful and she dies.”

105. MCU: Patricia with her finger in her mouth, striking a pensive pose.

VAN DOUDE (off, now speaking in French): I'd be so sad if that hap-
pened to you, Patricia.
PATRICIA (in French also): We'll see.
VAN DOUDE: What’s wrong?
PATRICIA: If I could dig a hole in the ground so that no one would see
me, I’d do it.

106. MLS: from the diagonal angle as at the end of shot 103.

VAN DOUDE: No, you have to do like elephants. When they are sad, or
the opposite, they leave. (Jn English.) They vanish. He takes a sip of
coffee.
PATRICIA (in English): | don’t know if I’m unhappy because I’m not
free, or if I’m not free because I’m unhappy.
VAN DOUDE (in French): | got involved in a story. I’m going to tell you
about it. It’ll change your mind.

107. MCU: Patricia, chin in hand.

VAN DOUDE (off ): It was this girl that I’ve known for two years.

108. MCU: Van Doude.

VAN DOUDE: All of a sudden three days ago, I said to myself: “I’m
going to tell her we should sleep together.” While he speaks the image
pulses with minute JUMP CUTS, barely noticeable.

109. As in 107. Patricia shakes her head in disbelief.

VAN DOUDE (off): I had never thought of it before.

 Breathless 65

110. As in 108. He picks up a cigar. The minute cuts continue to make his face
pulse while he speaks.

VAN DOUDE: So I made a date, for lunch together. (He lights the cigar.)
I wanted to tell her ““Look here, we’re good friends. I think we should
sleep together.” Just to see, that’s all. And I don’t know, it flew right out
of my head. He laughs.

111. As in 107. She looks off into space, then smiles to herself.

VAN DOUDE (off ): Suddenly, I thought again and, right away, I sent her
a line saying that I had completely forgotten to tell her that we should
sleep together!

Liz, As in 108.

VAN DOUDE: Three hours later, I get a note from her saying: ‘“What an
amazing coincidence. I had exactly the same idea on my way to lunch.”
He puffs and exhales, staring at Patricia.
PATRICIA (off, in English): What’s happening to your projects for me
to write?
VAN DOUDE (in English): You go to Orly tomorrow to interview Parvu-
lesco, you know, the novelist.”

113. As in 104.

PATRICIA (in English): Marvelous! What time?

VAN DOUDE (in English): Just come to the office early tomorrow after-
noon. (He gathers up his books and she puts on her coat while they
both stand up. He helps her with her coat.) Well, 'm going. . . .
You're coming with me, of course.
PATRICIA (in English): Of course. . . . (Tries out a more tender intona-
tion.) Of course! . . . (Then brightly.) Of course!

114. MLS: the two coming down a spiral staircase. The camera pans around
from below the stairs. The couple heads left out the door, Van Doude
putting his arm around Patricia. The camera tracks back smoothly away
66 Breathless

from them as they exit. From off-screen, coming up the spiral stairs from
the basement, Michel enters wearing his hat and sunglasses. He casually
glances toward Patricia and Van Doude and without expression continues
around the stairs in the other direction. From his coat pocket he pulls
out a cigarette and uses the one he is already smoking to light it. Non-
chalantly he tosses the old one away, and walks, always in MS, through
the restaurant puffing on his cigarette. The sound of dishes and banging
pans gives way to Michel’s theme.

Champs Elysées, exterior, late afternoon

ES, Ls: pan of Patricia and Van Doude walking left to right down the busy
sidewalk. He has his arm around her. The music continues from the
previous scene.

116. LS: pan right to left of Patricia and Van Doude walking quickly across the
street toward his white convertible.

117. MLS: Michel at a newsstand.

MICHEL: France-Soir—is this the latest edition?

VENDOR (off): Yes, Mister! Eighth and latest.

Michel steps back, looks at the paper, then glances up toward the camera.

118. MCU: Michel’s Pov of Van Doude and Patricia kissing in his car. His
back is toward the camera but we see Patricia’s face; her eyes are closed.

119. Reverse angle, a bit tighter, of them kissing. They stop.

120. MCU: Michel, almost head-on. He mutters something to himself, obvi-

ously jealous and irritated.

1. LS: pan of Patricia and Van Doude driving off-screen from left to right.

22: LS: the avenue des Champs Elysées. Many cars are driving from left to
right. Van Doude’s is not especially visible. Streetlights come on as dusk
falls.
 Breathless 67

123. ELS: high-angle pan of the white convertible driving up the Champs
Elysées toward the Arc de Triomphe. The place de I’Etoile sparkles with
streetlights. Music ends with a fadeout to black.

Paris, exterior, day

124. ELS: the Eiffel Tower. Michel’s theme accompanies a tracking shot from
a car window. It becomes obscured by a row of trees.

125. Ls: Patricia alighting from the back of a bus onto a busy street.

126. MLS: Patricia crossing the street, hopping playfully along the white
markers of the crosswalk. The music stops.

127. cu: Patricia looking slightly off-camera to the left. She is looking at
herself in a store window. She takes a deep breath and with a slight smile
68 Breathless

on her face adjusts her coat. A woman holding an infant walks behind
her, out offocus. Patricia turns sideways.

128. MLS: showing Patricia from behind, looking at herself in a mirror placed
in the store window display. She pats her abdomen and pulls it in. QUICK
CUT:

Patricia’s Hotel, interior, day

129. MLS: Patricia enters her hotel through its French doors and walks behind
the desk to get her key from her letterbox. When she doesn’t find it, she
checks the other pigeonholes with no luck. She turns to the clerk behind
the desk.

PATRICIA: My key isn’t there?

The desk clerk looks up from the register and glances back at the
letterboxes.

DESK CLERK: You must have left it in the door, I suppose.

Patricia crosses in front of the desk clerk and walks right to climb the
stairs. The camera pans with her.

130. Black screen for an instant. Then with the sound of a switch the light
reveals a MS of Michel lying in bed. He flips over on his side, reaching
under the pillow, perhaps for his gun. He is covered to the waist by the
sheets but is nude from the waist up.

PATRICIA (off): Oh, darn it!

Michel relaxes upon hearing her voice and turns over on his back. He
smiles and rubs his hand over his hair.

MICHEL: Buongiorno!

Jazz piano music comes up.

 Breathless 69

131. LS: Michel in bed and Patricia walking past him to her desk. This side
view of the bed looks out past the open drapes to a bright sky, despite the
darkness suggested by the opening of the scene.

PATRICIA: What are you doing here?

MICHEL: There were no vacancies at the Claridge. (Patricia takes her
coat off.) So, then, I came here. I grabbed your key downstairs.

Patricia walks over and hangs her coat on a chair by the window.

PATRICIA: You could have gone somewhere else, there’s not just the
Claridge.
MICHEL: I always stay at the Claridge.
PATRICIA: Oh, you! You’re completely nuts.
MICHEL: Go on! What’s wrong? Don’t make such a face.

The music stops. She walks around the bed toward the camera and out of
frame. Michel grabs the bathrobe on the bed, puts it on, and gets up.

PATRICIA (as she is walking to the bathroom, in English): Let me be

alone. I can’t ever be alone when I want to.
MICHEL (at the same time Patricia is talking): Besides, that look doesn’t
suit you at all.

[5Z; MCU: Patricia in the bathroom looking in the mirror. The camera looks
over her shoulder at her reflection. She is brushing her eyebrows, then
her hair with a brush.

PATRICIA (turning to look off-screen left at Michel): What do you mean,

“make a face”’?

elie MCU: Michel, leaning against the bathroom door.

|

MICHEL: It’s like this. He makes faces at her: opening his mouth wide,
forming ‘‘ah’’;then baring his teeth for “‘eeh’’ ; and, last, scowling and
circling his lips for “‘ooh.”’
70 Breathless

134. As in 132. She repeats his faces, staring in the mirror; then turns back to
him.

PATRICIA: I think it suits me just fine.

135. QUICK CUT to MS: pan left of Patricia. She walks by Michel to get a
towel.

MICHEL: Youre nuttier than I am.

136. MCU: Michel looking in the mirror. He rubs his thumb over his upper lip.

MICHEL (speaking to his image in the mirror while jazz music comes up
again): That pisses me off. I always go for girls who aren’t made for
me.” (He turns quickly to yell at her.) Patricia!

13de MLS: Patricia is standing at the opposite end of the bedroom by the
window. Michel walks across the bed instead of around it toward her.
She appears sad.

MICHEL: You saw me following you last night? Come on, answer. An-
swer! What’s wrong with you?

They sit together on the edge of the bed with their backs to the camera.
The music stops.

PATRICIA: Let me alone. I’m thinking.

MICHEL: What about?
PATRICIA: The thing is that I don’t even know! She stretches her arms up.
MICHEL (gently rubbing the back of her head): I do.
PATRICIA (pulling away): No, nobody knows.
MICHEL (leaning back on the bed): You're thinking about last night.
Why, yes, you are!
PATRICIA (leaning toward him): Last night, I was furious. Now, I don’t
know, it doesn’t matter. (As she falls flat on her side on the bed.) No,
I’m thinking about nothing.

138. Cu: Patricia lying on her stomach with her face buried in the bed.
 Breathless 71

PATRICIA (leaning up and supporting her chin with her hand): Vd like
to think of something . . . (She looks back at Michel.) . . . but I can’t.

139. Ms: Michel from the foot of the bed.

MICHEL (sitting up): Well, me, I’m tired. Very tired, and I’m going back
to bed.

Patricia crosses over to the other side of Michel as he is getting under the
covers. She sits on the bed, leans on a teddy bear, and looks at him.

MICHEL: Why are you looking at me?

PATRICIA: Because I’m looking at you.
MICHEL: You should have stayed with me yesterday.
PATRICIA: I couldn't.
MICHEL: Yes, you could have. You just had to tell the guy you couldn't
see him.
PATRICIA: But I had to see him. He’s going to have me writing articles.
It’s very important for me, Michel.
MICHEL: No, what’s important is going to Rome with me.
PATRICIA (staring out the window, screen right): Maybe, I don’t know.
MICHEL: You sleep with him?
PATRICIA: No.
MICHEL (pulling the covers over his head as the music comes in): Bet
you did!
PATRICIA: No, Michel. You know, he’s very nice . . . (Leaning on her
bear.) . . . He says one day we’ll make love, but not right now.
MICHEL (pulling the covers down from his head): What does he know
about it! He doesn’t even know me.
PATRICIA: Not you. Him and me. (Michel covers his head up again.)
We went to Montparnasse. For a drink.
MICHEL (pulling the covers down): To Montparnasse? I was there too!
What time?

The music stops.

PATRICIA: I don’t know. We didn’t stay long. . . . Why did you come
here, Michel?
72 Breathless

MICHEL (pulling the covers back over his head): Me? Because I feel like
sleeping with you again.
PATRICIA: I don’t find that a reason.
MICHEL: Evidently it is. It means that I love you.
PATRICIA (lifting her head off the bear): And me, I don’t know yet if I
love you.
MICHEL (flinging the sheet off, he sits up and moves closer to her):
When will you know?
PATRICIA: Soon.
MICHEL: What does that mean: soon? In a month, in a year?*° Michel
grabs a magazine from the bed and flips through it.
PATRICIA: Soon means soon.

140. CU: the pages of the magazine Michel is looking at. It contains pictures
of nude women in various poses.

MICHEL (off, declaming): Women never want to do in eight seconds. . .

(JUMP CUT as the pages of the magazine flip by.) . . . what they are
willing to do eight days later. . . . (Another JUMP CUT.) It’s all the
same ...(JUMPCUT.).. . eight seconds or eight days, or why not
then eight centuries?

141. MS: the two on the bed. Patricia is kneeling.

PATRICIA: No, eight days is plenty.

MICHEL (throwing the magazine down on the bed): “Yes.” “No.” With
women it’s always halfway. You know, it really wears me out. (Michel
grabs Patricia’s drawstring purse from the desk and starts to go
through it.) Why don’t you want to sleep with me again?
PATRICIA: Because I’d like to know. There’s something about you. . .
(Michel snaps the purse shut and throws it back on the desk.) . . . that
I like but I don’t know what. I wish we were Romeo and Juliet.

142. Cut away to a CU of a small reproduction of a Picasso on the wall.’

MICHEL (off): Oh, 1a, la. What a girlish idea.

143. As in 141.
 Breathless 73

PATRICIA: You see, you said last night, in the car, you couldn't live
without me. But you can. (Michel looks annoyed with her. He rubs and
pats his stomach.) Romeo couldn't live without Juliet, but you can,
you can.
MICHEL (closing his bathrobe around him): No, I can’t live without you.
PATRICIA (imitating Michel’s previous tone): Oh, 1a, 1a! Now that’s just
a boyish idea.
MICHEL: Smile at me!

Patricia shakes her head no.

MICHEL (pointing his finger at her): Fine, Pll count to eight . . . if by

eight you haven’t smiled at me, I’ll strangle you.
74 Breathless

144. cu: Patricia with Michel’s hands around her neck. She straightens her
hair and prepares herself for the countdown. Michel’s theme comes in.

MICHEL: ...two...three.. . four-five-six . . . seven. . . seven and

a half. . . seven and three-fourths . . . (Patricia looks determined not
to smile and not at all frightened.) You’re such a coward, I'll bet you
smile.

Patricia smiles at him and laughs.

145. Ms: the couple from the foot of the bed, their hands entwined. Patricia
extricates herself.

PATRICIA: I don’t feel like playing anymore today.

She gets up and, walking on the bed, crosses in front of Michel. As she
hops off, Michel reaches up and flips her skirt up. She slaps him in the
face and walks off, leaving him alone in MS.

MICHEL (rubbing his face where she slapped him): You’re a coward. It’s
too bad.
PATRICIA (off):Why do you say that to me?
MICHEL (taking his bathrobe off ): You bother me. I don’t know.
PATRICIA (off): You, too.
MICHEL: No, me, I’m not a coward.
PATRICIA (off):How can you know that I’m afraid?

146. MCU: Patricia standing by the window in silhouette. She is trying to

strike a match to light the cigarette in her mouth.

MICHEL (suddenly off-screen, his voice cues the cut to 146): As soon
as a girl says everything is just fine and she can’t manage to light her
cigarette, well, it’s that she’s scared of something. I don’t know what,
but she’s afraid.

Patricia lights the cigarette.

 Breathless 75

147. MLS: a higher angle on Michel and Patricia. He is leaning against the
headboard as before, she is sitting facing him. Behind her is the window,
putting them both slightly in silhouette.

PATRICIA (offering a box to Michel): Have a cigarette.

MICHEL: No, shit, not Chesterfields! Get my coat. Mine are in the
pocket. He points to his coat which is lying at the foot of the bed. She
goes over to get it and holds it up for him to see.
PATRICIA: This one?
MICHEL (impatiently): Give!

She tosses the coat over him. Michel goes through his pockets looking for
his cigarettes. Patricia walks over to the side of the bed, kneels down,
and picks his passport off of the floor.

PATRICIA (opening the passport): Is this your passport?

MICHEL: No, it’s my brother’s. Mine’s in the car.
PATRICIA: But the name Kovacs is written on it.
MICHEL: Oh, yes, it’s not my real brother. When he was born, Mama
was already divorced. (He reaches over and grabs the passport from
her.) Come on, give! (He lights his cigarette.) You see, I’m not afraid.
PATRICIA: I never said you were.
MICHEL: You did so, Joe! [Tu parles, Charles!]
PATRICIA: No.
MICHEL: You wanted to say it, and now you're sore and can’t anymore.
PATRICIA: Now, I’m not talking to you anymore. She gets up off the bed,
walks to the window, and stands looking out to the street below with
her back to Michel.
MICHEL (picking up the teddy bear and looking at it): Do you think
about death sometimes? Me, I never stop thinking about it. He tosses
the teddy bear away.
PATRICIA (turning around from the window to face him): Michel?
MICHEL: What?
PATRICIA: Say something nice to me.
MICHEL: What?
PATRICIA: I don't know.
MICHEL: Well, neither do I.
76 Breathless

PATRICIA (picking up the ashtray with the Rolls Royce embossed on it

that he took from the young woman’s apartment in shot 71): | like your
ashtray. She walks over to the side of the bed and hands it to him.
MICHEL (taking it from her): A BM6. My grandfather had a Rolls. Great
car! We never lifted the hood in fifteen years.

Michel grabs Patricia by the waist and pulls her toward him. She frees
herself and walks over to the wall facing the bed, the camera panning
with her. She reaches beside her for a loosely rolled up poster and holds
it flat against the wall to see what it looks like.

PATRICIA: Have you seen my new poster?

MICHEL (off): Patricia, come here!
PATRICIA (to herself in English): No.
MICHEL: But yes, God! What!
PATRICIA: Here, it doesn’t go well at all. Where can I put it? Patricia
takes the poster to the opposite wall, above the desk. The camera pans
left with her.
MICHEL: Why did you slap me when I looked at your legs? He rubs his
hands on her legs as she is putting the poster on the wall.
PATRICIA: It wasn’t my legs.
MICHEL: It’s exactly the same.

Patricia rolls the poster up while Michel flips through a newspaper.

PATRICIA: The French always say that things are the same when they
aren’t at all.
MICHEL: I’ve found something nice to say, Patricia. He puts down the
paper.
PATRICIA (turning toward Michel): What?
MICHEL: I want to sleep with you because you’re beautiful.
PATRICIA (shyly): No, I’m not.
MICHEL: Then, because you're ugly.
PATRICIA: It’s the same?

Going around the bed, she walks off-screen in MLS. He follows her with
his eyes. She reenters the frame brushing past and blocking the camera
 Breathless 77

lens. She disappears to the left of the camera, which is stable throughout
the shot.

MICHEL (taking the cigarette out of his mouth): Sure, my little girl, it’s
the same.

148. MCU: Patricia turning to answer him. She stands by the bathroom door
with the poster rolled up in her hands.

PATRICIA: You're a liar, Michel.

149. cu: Michel’s face, then tilting quickly up the wall as he replies.

MICHEL: It would be stupid to lie. (The tilt rests on a Picasso print di-
rectly above Michel.** He continues, off.) It’s like poker, might as well
tell the truth. The others still think you’re bluffing. (Tilt back down to
Michel.) And that way you win. (Looking at Patricia.) What is it?

150. As in 148. Patricia’s theme comes in. She is rubbing her eyes and nose
as if she has been crying.

PATRICIA: I’m going to look at you until you stop looking at me.
MICHEL (off): Me, too.

151. cu: Michel from Patricia’s POV. He rubs his upper lip with his thumb.

eye As in 150. She rolls the poster tighter, holds it to her eye and looks
through it at Michel.

153. Pov from Patricia’s eye, looking through the rolled-up poster. Michel
poses with his hand clutching a cigarette resting under his chin. Zoom in
to an intense ECU as Patricia’s theme on the piano is transformed into
Michel's.”

154. Reverse zoom out of their lips parting after a tender kiss. The zoom con-
tinues to a MCU showing them together framed by the bathroom doorway.
The piano music trills softly to a halt.
78 Breathless

155. JUMP CUT fo MS: Michel leans back on one edge of the doorway while
putting his hand on the other edge. Patricia is almost under his arm.

PATRICIA: I’m going to put my poster in the bathroom.

Camera pans as she walks over to a bathroom wall. Michel shifts position
to stand on her right. Now he leans with his right hand on the wall.

MICHEL: Can I use the phone?

PATRICIA: Yes. (As she tacks up the poster, he rubs her derriére. The
camera tilts down to catch him at it.) There. Not bad, eh?
MICHEL (ambiguous as to his referent): Yes, very nice!

The camera tilts back up to the poster reproduction of a young girl in

profile.*°

PATRICIA: You like this poster?

MICHEL (taking the cigarette out of his mouth): Not bad.
PATRICIA: Renoir was a very great painter.
MICHEL (irritated): I said: not bad!

Patricia suddenly stops looking at the picture and turns to put her head
against it, facing out toward Michel. She is whimsically posing to the left
of the painted girl, who seems to be looking at her.

PATRICIA: Do you think she is prettier than I am?

156. MCU: Patricia and the painted girl, carefully matching profiles, facing
each other. She holds this pose briefly, then pulls away from the poster
to look off-screen at Michel.

MICHEL (off ): As soon as you're afraid or you’re surprised, both at the

same time, you have a funny reflection in your eyes.
PATRICIA (turning her head left where Michel has presumably moved):
And then?
MICHEL (off): I'd like to sleep with you again. . .
 Breathless 79

td
rn.
157. MCU: reverse angle of Michel washing his face at the sink, while Patricia
enters from behind the camera.

MICHEL: . . because of that reflection.

She leaves the frame screen right while he keeps rubbing his face with a
washcloth. When she is off-screen, she addresses him.

PATRICIA (off): Michel.

158. Ms: Patricia washing her feet at the bidet, which is just under the Renoir
poster.

159. As in 157. Michel continues washing. They speak at the same moment.
80 Breathless

PATRICIA (quietly repeats, off ): Michel.

MICHEL: Can I piss in the sink?

160. As in 158.

PATRICIA: Guess what I’m going to tell you.

MICHEL (off): No idea.
PATRICIA: I’m pregnant, Michel.
MICHEL: Eh?
PATRICIA: You heard very well.
MICHEL (off):Go on! By who? By me?
PATRICIA: Yes, I think so.
MICHEL (off): You saw a doctor?
PATRICIA: I went yesterday morning. (She begins to dry her feet.) He
told me to come back on Thursday for the results.
MICHEL (angrily, off): You could have been more careful.

Patricia looks at him, shocked and hurt.

161. MLS: high angle on Michel coming out of the bathroom. He is wearing
only his shorts. He steps off-screen right, starting to climb across the
bed. Patricia follows him out of the bathroom a second later. She stops,
puts her foot on the bed, and continues drying it with a towel. Then she
walks across the bed to the window, the camera panning with her. She
passes in front of Michel who is sitting on the bed with the telephone.

MICHEL (into the telephone): Hello, I want Elysée 99-84 . . . 99-84.

The camera pans back with Patricia as she leaves the window and walks
back across the bed. The camera now holds on Michel sitting on the bed
and talking into the phone.”

MICHEL: Is Antonio there? You don’t know if he’s coming back? I'll call
back later. Michel Poiccard. (He hangs up the phone, then picks it up
again.) Elysée 25—32. (To Patricia, who has walked into the shot from
the left, crossing the bed to stand in front of her desk. She fishes for
 Breathless 81

a record album.) I phoned the guy who owes me money. (Jnto the
phone.) Mr. Tolmatchoff, please.

Patricia, with her back to the camera, picks a record out and walks
screen left over the bed once more to the record player atop the closet.

MICHEL (into the phone, off ): Hey, kid! Tell me, I can’t manage to find
Berruti. . . . He wasn’t there. . . . |wandered Montparnasse all night.
(Patricia puts on an album of piano music—Chopin. The camera pans
quickly to the right over to Michel.) The police?! Thanks. Ciao, kid!
(Michel hangs up the phone, stands up on the bed, and walks on it
toward the bathroom. The camera pans with him. When he reaches the
edge of the bed he slips off.) Oh shit!

162. MCU: Patricia in the bathroom in front of the mirror. She is wearing a
different top.

PATRICIA (turning to her left toward Michel): What is it?

MICHEL (coming into the shot from the left): | slipped. (He takes his
cigarette out of his mouth.) Reminds me of the one about the con-
demned man. You know it?
PATRICIA (putting on perfume): No.
MICHEL: A man condemned to death is mounting the scaffold. He slips
on a step and says, ‘Well, I am unlucky!” ** (JUMP CUT as Michel
cups her face in his hands and brings it close to him. He stares at her
for a moment, then lets go. Slight pan right follows her. Michel’s face
slips out of frame.) At times, you have the face of a Martian.
PATRICIA (brushing her hair): Yes, that’s because I’m on the moon.

JUMP CUT minutely reframes so that Michel is in the shot again with
Patricia.

MICHEL: What an idea, my God . . . having a baby!

PATRICIA: But it’s not certain, Michel. I only want to know what you’ll
say.

JUMP CUT. Michel’s hand pulls at her shoulder strap.

82 Breathless

MICHEL: Why don’t you get naked?

PATRICIA: What’s the use?
MICHEL: You Americans are dumb.
PATRICIA: I don't see why.

In the background, besides the Chopin, there is the sound of a siren that
almost drowns Michel out.

MICHEL: Yes. The proof is that you admire Lafayette and Maurice
Chevalier, when they’re the dumbest of all Frenchmen. I’m going to the
phone. (He leaves Patricia, who is clipping a few strands of hair, and
speaks into the phone, off.) Belle-Epine 35—26. Patricia, come here.

Patricia utterly ignores him. She brushes her hair, then counts to nine on
her fingers, covers her eyes with her hands for a moment, uncovers them,
and stares at herself in the mirror. While she is doing this, Michel talks
on the phone.

MICHEL (into the phone): Hello! Mr. Loursat? He’ll be there this after-
noon? Tell him I'll come to see him. I’m calling on behalf of Toni. . .
from Marseille. . . . Laszlo Kovacs. . . . I’m bringing him an
American.
PATRICIA (saluting to herself in the mirror. In English): Dismissed. (She
turns left, military fashion, then speaks to Michel.) An American?

163. MS of Michel on the bed talking on the telephone.

MICHEL (into the phone): Laszlo Kovacs . . . (He hangs up and crawls
into bed. To Patricia.) No, not you! An American one. An American car!

164. MCU: Patricia looking down at Michel.-She is at the record player and
has just taken the record off.

165. JUMP CUT fo MS: Patricia kneeling beside Michel who lies in bed smok-
ing. She looks at the record album.

MICHEL: I can't find the guy who owes me the dough. It’s the shits!
 Breathless 83

Patricia is more interested in her record and ignores Michel.

PATRICIA: Do you like records or the radio better?

MICHEL: Shut up! I’m thinking!

Patricia gets up from the bed and walks across Michel’s body, jumping off
the bed and out of frame. As she does so, Michel pulls at her shorts.
Patricia leans back into the shot and slaps him across the face. Michel
takes a puff of his cigarette, turns his head away, then looks toward her
once more.

166. MCU: Patricia standing by the window. She looks at a record and flips
it over.

PATRICIA (to herself ): Bach! I know them all by heart. She puts the rec-
ord albums down.
MICHEL (off):How old are you?
PATRICIA (turning as if she doesn’t hear him; to herself):’'m going to
turn on the radio. (Answering Michel and cueing the next cut.) Twenty.

167. QUICK CUT fo CU: Patricia leaning down toward Michel. Pan down
Patricia’s arm to a CU of Michel lying in bed smoking. She is out of
frame. Jazz piano music starts up.

MICHEL (to Patricia, who is now sitting on the bed near his head): You
don’t look it.
PATRICIA (off):Why don’t you like music?
MICHEL: That depends, yes! (As he answers her the camera pans up to
MCU Of Patricia, leaving him just out of frame. His hand can be seen
tugging at her shirt.) Come on, Patricia! Come to Italy. (With an
Italian accent.) Italia! (Patricia smiles down at him.) Where do they
get you, your classes at the Sorbonne? Really!
PATRICIA: You, didn’t you ever take exams?

The camera pans down again to a CU of Michel and the music stops.

MICHEL: Yes. Only the first “bac.” * After that, I dropped out [plaqué].
PATRICIA (not comprehending the French term, off): What is ““plaqué”’?
84 Breathless

MICHEL: I did something else.

PATRICIA (off):What?
MICHEL: I sold cars.
PATRICIA (reaching down to rub something from under his eye, off ):
Here? In Paris?
MICHEL: No. (The camera pans up to Patricia.) In New York, did you
sleep with guys often?
PATRICIA: Not that often.
MICHEL (off):How many times?

She thinks about it for a moment, then holds up seven fingers. The piano
music starts again.

PATRICIA: And you?

MICHEL: Me? (The camera pans down to Michel as he gestures five
times with his open hand.) Not that many either.
PATRICIA (off):You know where I’d like to live? In Mexico. Everyone
 Breathless 85

told me it’s beautiful. When I was little, my father always told me,
“We're going next Saturday.” But he always forgot.

During her speech the camera pans back up to Patricia. The music stops.
Michel sits up and gets closer to Patricia so that he is in the shot.

MICHEL: No, Mexico, I’m wary. I’m sure that it’s not so beautiful. (The
camera pans Slightly to a CU of Michel.) People are such liars. (He
takes the cigarette out of his mouth.) It’s like Stockholm. Everyone who
comes back says: “Swedish girls are great. I had three of them every
day. You should go!” Me, I went, and it’s a lie. (Piano music.) First,
Swedish girls are . . . (He puts the cigarette back in his mouth.) . . .
very different from what they are in Paris . . . and then, they are, in
general, just as ugly as Parisian girls.
PATRICIA (off ): But no, Swedish girls are very pretty.

Slight pan right to frame Patricia in MCU just after her speech.

MICHEL (off):No, no, a legend! One or two, yes, right.

The music stops and Patricia looks down at Michel.

MICHEL (off ): Exactly like in Paris or London, but not all of them. No,
the only towns where the girls one meets in the street are good-looking,
not sublime, okay, but like you, charming, girls you can rate. . . I
don’t know . . . fifteen out of twenty, because they’ve all got something
. . . (Patricia looks at him and carefully listens, off-screen.) . . . it’s not
Rome, not Paris, not Rio. (The camera pans over to Michel as a very
loud siren drowns him out.) It’s Lausanne and Geneva.* (He leans over
to her and kisses her shoulder. The jazz piano comes in.) You too, tell
me something nice.
PATRICIA: And me too, I don’t know what. She turns away from him and
leans back on the headboard. He slides out of frame right. Patricia’s
theme comes in. His hand enters the frame touching her shoulder. He
begins to slide it down her arm, which is encircling her bent legs.
MICHEL (off): If you were with another guy, would you let him caress
you? His hand is touching her knees now.
86 Breathless

The camera pans back up to Patricia’s face.

PATRICIA: You know, you said I was afraid, Michel. . . . (Staring off
toward the window.) It’s true: I’m afraid because I want you to love
me. . . . And then, I don’t know, at the same time, I want you not to
love me anymore. I’m very independent, you know.

Michel moves into this CU, and turns her head toward him by the chin.

MICHEL: And so what? Me, I love you, and not like you believe.
PATRICIA (freeing her chin by turning her head away): How?
MICHEL: Not like you believe.
PATRICIA: You don’t know what I believe.
MICHEL: Yes, I do.
PATRICIA: You don’t know what I think.

Michel sits back, moving out of the shot, except for his hand which con-
tinues to touch her hair and neck.

MICHEL: Yes, I do.

PATRICIA (sadly, looking down): No, it’s impossible. (She glances up
with a new thought.) | want to know what’s behind your face. (The
camera pans over to Michel, who has a surprised look on his face. She
goes on, off.) ’ve watched it for ten minutes and I see nothing. . .
nothing . . . nothing! (Michel rubs his upper lip with his thumb as his
theme music comes in.) 1m not sad, but I’m afraid.
MICHEL (as the camera pans over to Patricia and he strokes her face):
Sweet, gentle Patricia.
PATRICIA: Oh, no.

168. ECU: Patricia looking at Michel. The music stops. She lights a cigarette
and smiles at Michel.

MICHEL (off): All right. Cruel, stupid . . . heartless, pitiful, cowardly,

hateful...
PATRICIA (smiling in a sly manner and puffing on a cigarette): Yes, yes. .
MICHEL (off ): You don’t even know how to put on lipstick. It’s amazing.
Suddenly, I find you ugly.
 Breathless 87

Patricia turns away from him.

169. QUICK CUT to CU: Patricia from the front.

PATRICIA (turning left toward Michel, then defiantly away): Say what
you want, it’s all the same to me. I’m putting it all in my book.
MICHEL (coming in closer so that both of their faces are contained in
the CU shot): What book?
PATRICIA: I’m writing a novel.
MICHEL: You?
PATRICIA: Why not me?

He tosses his cigarette out, and begins to rub her shoulder then tries to
slide the shoulder of her sleeveless top down.

PATRICIA: What are you doing?

MICHEL: Taking off your shirt.

The camera pans to Patricia so that Michel is out of the shot.

PATRICIA: Not now, Michel.

MICHEL (off): Oh, you’re annoying. Why not, anyway?
PATRICIA (picking up a book and looking at the cover): Do you know
William Faulkner?

Michel leans in closer to her so that he is in the shot. He puts his head
Just over her right shoulder.

MICHEL: No, who is it? You’ve slept with him?

PATRICIA (looking up at him): Of course not, darling.
MICHEL: Then to hell with him. Take off your shirt.
PATRICIA (pulling away from him): He’s a novelist that I like. . . .
You’ve read The Wild Palms?* She holds the book up to him so that he
can see the cover.
MICHEL: Take your jersey off.
PATRICIA: Listen, the last sentence is beautiful. (She reads in English.
Michel looks at her as she reads.) “Between grief and nothing I will
take grief.” (She turns to him and repeats the line in French.) “Be-
88 Breathless

tween grief and nothingness, I choose grief.”” And you, what would you
choose?

The music stops. Michel leans back on the bed, away from her. The
camera pans with him so that Patricia is off-screen.

MICHEL: Show me your toes. (He leans on his elbow.) A woman’s toes
are most important. Don’t laugh.
PATRICIA (off ): What would you choose?
MICHEL: Grief is idiotic; I'd choose nothingness. (Patricia leans in front
of Michel to put the book back on the desk.) It’s not any better, but
grief, it’s acompromise. You’ve got to have all or nothing. So, now, I
know it, there it is. (Patricia’s theme begins.) Why do you shut your
eyes?

The camera pans to Patricia. She has her eyes shut, Michel’s hat on, and
her chin resting on her hands, one of which has a cigarette between the
fingers.

PATRICIA: I’m trying to shut them very hard so that everything goes
black. But I can’t manage to. It’s never completely black.

Michel’s theme starts. Patricia looks at him and the camera pans minutely
to include him.

MICHEL: Your smile. . . in profile . . . it’s the best thing you’ve got. It’s
you. Michel pushes himself up so that his head starts to cross left
behind her. The music stops.

170. QUICK CUT 10 4 Slightly closer CU: Patricia now looking left at Michel
who is off-screen.

PATRICIA: It’s me. She laughs.

Wal MLS: Michel and Patricia next to each other on the bed, leaning against
the headboard. Michel’s legs are under the sheet. Patricia tosses the hat
and cigarette off-screen right. Patricia turns to face Michel. They stare at
each other, motionless.
 Breathless 89

PATRICIA: We’re looking into each other’s eyes and it’s useless.

Jazz piano music quietly fades in.

MICHEL (in an Italian accent): Patricia Franchini.

PATRICIA (looking down as if embarrassed): I hate that name. I'd like to
be called Ingrid.
MICHEL: Kneel down.

She kneels a bit further down the bed, closer to the camera. The music
stops and the sounds of a radio broadcast can be heard.

PATRICIA: What’s the matter?

RADIO VOICE: . . . This broadcast, ladies, gentlemen, ends. . .
MICHEL: I’m looking at you.
RADIO VOICE: . . . a broadcast of Nadia Tagrine, featuring the artist.*°
PATRICIA: The French are idiots too.

Michel pulls the sheet over his head. Trumpets blare over the radio. His
head comes out from behind the sheet.

MICHEL: I want you to stay with me.

The music stops.

PATRICIA: Yes. She looks at him and gets under the sheet. He ducks his
head back under the sheet so they are both completely covered.
RADIO VOICE: We momentarily interrupt our broadcast in order to syn-
chronize our transmitter.
PATRICIA (from under the sheet): It’s strange.
MICHEL: What?
PATRICIA: I see my reflection in your eyes.

JUMP CUT to a slightly wider angle. They are rolling around under the
covers.

MICHEL: I’m laughing because this is truly a Franco-American

encounter.
90 Breathless

JUMP CUT. Patricia’s head alone is outside the sheets.

PATRICIA: We'll hide like elephants when they’re happy.

JUMP CUT. The sheet covers both of them completely again.

MICHEL: A woman’s hips . . . this really gets me.

PATRICIA: I’m too hot.

Michel gets out from under the covers and throws off the top blankets
covering their legs. Then he carefully replaces the sheet over her head.
JUMP CUT So that he too is fully under the sheet.

MICHEL: If it was another man than me that caressed you, would you
care, or not?
PATRICIA (gently): You already asked me.

172. MS: on a sudden sound, the radio.

RADIO VOICE: Our broadcast, ““Work in Music,” is starting. For you,

“Work in Music.”

A light military tune played by a dance band begins to play on the radio.
The camera pans over to the bed. Patricia and Michel are rustling under
the covers. The camera then pans back over to the radio. Patricia’s arm
reaches into the frame and turns it off.

PATRICIA: And there we are!

173. MCU: Michel sits up. Patricia gets out of bed and crosses in front of him.
His eyes follow her.

174. Ms: Patricia, now wearing Michel’s longsleeved white shirt, standing next
to a photograph of herself. She walks away. The camera holds on the
photograph.

PATRICIA (off):Do you know a book by Dylan Thomas . . .

 Breathless 91

175. Mcu: Michel.

PATRICIA (off): . . . Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog?*’

176. McU: from behind, Patricia drinking a glass of water.

MICHEL (singing, off ): Sunday morning, it’s the perfect time to stay in
bed all day.

177. MS: an angle off to the right of Michel in bed. The camera pans left to
Patricia at her closet.

PATRICIA (as she sits on the end of the bed): 'm getting dressed.
MICHEL (rubbing her back): What time is it?
PATRICIA: Noon.
MICHEL (pulling her toward him to try to kiss her): It was good?
92 Breathless

PATRICIA (in English with her teeth clenched): Yes, sir! She pulls
away.
MICHEL: We’ll sleep until tonight.
PATRICIA: No! I’ve got to buy a dress. (She gets up and walks toward
the closet, the camera following her.) You have your car?
MICHEL (off):My car. Yes, yes.
PATRICIA (going over to him and kissing him): Good morning, Michel.

The camera holds on Michel as she walks to the closet. From off-screen
she throws him his hat and his white shirt. Michel gets on the telephone
and asks for a number.

MICHEL ( putting on his hat): Elysée 99-84. Hello. Good day, Madame.
Has Antonio been in yet? (He begins to put his shirt on with one hand
while the other is holding the phone.) Oh, boy! This is terrible. You
don’t know where he is? No, oh well . . . Still Michel Poiccard. He has
his shirt on and starts buttoning it. Patricia passes in front of him to
pick up her purse from the desk. He hangs up the phone.
PATRICIA (off): Do you want me to wear my brassiere, Michel?
MICHEL (in English): As you like it, Baby.

178. QUICK CUT fo MLS: Patricia standing in the doorway of the bathroom
putting on a shoe. She turns around to look at herself in the mirror.

PATRICIA: Do you like most my eyes, my mouth, or my shoulders? She

turns right, waiting to hear Michel’s answer.

179. QUICK CUT to MLS: Michel, head-on, with his hat, shirt, and tie on,
putting on his pants.

PATRICIA (off): If you had to choose. . .

180. JUMP CUT. MS: pan as Michel approaches Patricia at the closet, where
she stands before the mirror. He touches her derriére, then moves right
off-screen. JUMP CUT pans to reframe him before another mirror adjust-
ing his hat.
 Breathless 93

MICHEL: Your press conference, it was a gag, right?

PATRICIA (off, while he adjusts his tie): No, it’s in just a bit at Orly.
MICHEL (shadowboxing with his image in the mirror): I’m not especially
handsome, but I’m a great boxer.** (He turns left facing her as he stops
boxing.) Where are you going? To this press conference?

Pan to Patricia adjusting her dress in front of her mirror.

PATRICIA: I’ve got to stop by the office first.

MICHEL (off): Pll accompany you.
PATRICIA (in English): All right.
RADIO VOICE: This afternoon, then, President Eisenhower is to accom-
pany General de Gaulle to the Arc de Triomphe, where they will place
a wreath on the tomb of the unknown soldier. Then they will go down
the Champs Elysées. . .
PATRICIA: Did you go to war? The camera pans as she takes her purse,
walks over to the bed, and sits down with her back to the camera.
MICHEL (off): Yes.
PATRICIA: And, what did you do?
MICHEL (off ): Cut [zigouillais] the sentries’ throats.
PATRICIA: What is “‘zigouiller”’?

181. MS: high angle looking down on Michel and Patricia. They are lying
on the bed with their heads toward the camera. Both wear sunglasses,
Michel is leaning over her.

MICHEL: I laid them down like this . . .

PATRICIA: Oh, Michel.
MICHEL: I’m tired. I’m going to die. He lays his head on her chest and
Patricia’s theme comes in.
PATRICIA: Youre crazy.
MICHEL: I’m completely nuts [dingue].
PATRICIA: What is ‘“‘dingue’’?
MICHEL: (pointing to himself ): It’s me. They start to kiss.

182. ECU: match cut of Michel and Patricia kissing. They both take their
sunglasses off and kiss again.
94 Breathless

Center of Paris, exterior, day

183. ELS: aerial view of the Louvre. The violin music from the previous shot
carries over and soars.

184. Match cut on motion to similar aerial view of Notre Dame.

185. MS: Patricia and Michel sitting in chairs at a sidewalk café. They are
facing out onto the street.

PATRICIA: It’s not here . . . your car?

MICHEL (pointing): Yes...No... Yes. . . . It’s in the garage. I'll go
get it and then we’re off. He gets up and leaves.

186. MLS: Michel running across the street away from the camera.

187. MS: Patricia, sitting in the chair, looking through a book.

188. LS: Michel kicking tires of cars parked along a narrow street. He crosses
the street toward the camera.

189. QUICK CUT fo MLS: looking up the street. Michel is leaning into a
convertible, evidently searching for the keys. A man comes waiking out of
a building behind Michel. He stops and regards Michel suspiciously.

190. MLS: a different street. Michel walks into the shot from frame left. Cam-
era pans slightly right with him. A man in a white T-shirt is just getting
out of a white convertible. He heads left out of frame against the pan. The
camera slows with Michel as he goes by the car, then turns to watch the
man off-screen.

19f. MCU: over Patricia’s right shoulder. She puts down a drink and looks at
her wristwatch.

192, As in 190. Michel is on the sidewalk now, looking the car over.

MICHEL (to himself ): Neat, a Ford. He runs around the back of the car
and off-screen left to follow the driver.
 Breathless 95

193. ELS: Michel running right. When he gets close behind the man, he slows
to follow him quietly around a corner.

Apartment Building Lobby and Elevator, interior, day

194. Ls: lobby of an apartment building. The camera faces a very large
mirror. The driver walks in and turns right off-screen. Michel then enters.

195. Black screen.

MICHEL: What floor?

DRIVER: Fifth.

Michel strikes a match to light his cigarette, revealing a MS of the two

men facing the camera. Through the ironwork of the elevator in the
background, the various floors can be seen going by, and it gets brighter
as they go up. Michel looks anxiously around while the driver, in a T-
shirt, mainly stares at him. The elevator stops. The driver hurries out.

MICHEL: I picked the wrong floor.

He turns and punches the ground floor button. The elevator begins to
descend.

196. QUICK CUT fo shot 194 with Michel running full speed out of the
building.

Paris Streets, exterior, day

197. QUICK CUT fo LS: through a car window, Michel getting into the Ford.

198. QUICK CUT to LS: Michel driving down the street.

199. cu: Patricia looking out into the street. She lifts her sunglasses up on her
forehead. She takes the glasses off and has a puzzled look on her face.

200. MLS: from behind Patricia onto the street. Michel drives up in the white
convertible. He stops in front of the café. Patricia stands, gets her things,
and walks to the car.
96 Breathless

201. QUICK CUT to Ms: Patricia and Michel from the back seat.

PATRICIA (looking at herself in her compact mirror): Are you afraid to

get old? I am.
MICHEL: You're stupid. I already told you that the worst fault is
cowardice.

They kiss.

202. Tracking shots of the buildings along the street.

PATRICIA (off ): Are you going to buy me the dress at Dior’s?

MICHEL (off ): Not on your life. They have dresses ten times more beau-
tiful at Prisunic.*” No, at Dior’s you don’t buy dresses, you use the
telephone. (The camera pans up a floor on a building and then back
down, outlining the entrance as they pass. It then continues panning
buildings till the end of the block.) You know, it’s the only place in Paris
where you can phone for free. There are twelve booths with outside
lines.

203. LS: looking down a street at a slight angle. A man slowly walks down the
sidewalk repeatedly but laconically calling out, ‘“France-Soir.”” Michel
pulls the car into center frame. Slight pan effaces the newspaper hawker
as Michel parks in MLS. Behind, on the other side of the street, is the
New York Herald Tribune office. The music stops. Patricia gets out of the
car and runs off-screen right. Michel gestures to the man selling papers.

MICHEL: Hey! France-Soir.

PATRICIA: I'll get dressed and be right back.

Michel takes a paper, reaches into his pocket, and hands the man, who
has come back into the frame, some money. Another man, who has just
crossed the street, calls out impatiently for a paper. The vendor walks in
front of the camera to sell him one.

NEWSMAN: Yes, Mister.

MICHEL: France-Soir.
 Breathless 97

A MAN (off): France-Soir.

NEWSMAN: Thank you, Mister.

204. MS: high angle over the front of the car. Michel is reading the paper.

A MAN (off): Come on! France-Soir, please.

205. MS: a man buying a newspaper.”

NEWSMAN: Here, here you are.

206. As in 204. Michel looks up from his paper and glances around.

2 ie ECU: the newspaper. Pan up the paper reveals a large photo of Michel
with the heading, ‘‘Route 7 Road Killer still at large.’ *'

208. MS: the man who has just bought a paper. He looks deliberately up from
his paper and over at Michel.

209) As in 204. Michel barely glances up, then pulls his sunglasses down a bit
and looks over the top of them at the man.

210. As in 208. The man looks back down at his paper. He seems to have rec-
ognized Michel from his picture in the paper.

PALE As in 209. Michel, still looking at the man, pushes up his sunglasses.

2123 MLS: Michel in the car on the street in front of the New York Herald
Tribune office. Patricia runs out the door. Michel turns around to look
at her and puts the paper in the back seat. JUMP CUT so that Patricia,
wearing a new dress, is in the middle of the street twirling around in front
of Michel. A pan keeps her in frame when she runs around the front of the
car to the passenger side. Michel reaches over to open the door for her.
Slight JUMP CUT as she gets into the car. The man who is suspicious
of Michel walks by the driver's side of the car, takes a quick glance at
Michel, and walks over to the New York Herald Tribune office as the
convertible drives off. He stops two policemen on the street and shows
98 Breathless

them the paper. Iris out on the three men with dramatic music as
punctuation.

Orly Airport Terrace, exterior, day

213. Iris in. MLS: Michel and Patricia as she puts a token in a turnstile
at Orly airport. No music but a great deal of airplane noise in the
background.

MICHEL: How long will it take?

PATRICIA: Half an hour, I don’t know.
MICHEL: Fine, Ill go find my man and come back.
PATRICIA: Okay!

214. QUICK CUT to MLS: Patricia heading away from the camera and up
some stairs.

MICHEL (off, as she runs up the stairs): Patricia. . .

253 MCU: Michel.

MICHEL: .. . Patricia!

ZAG: cu: Patricia from a low angle. She has turned around and stopped on the
stairs. She laughs.

PAE MLS: Michel shadowboxing. A man opens the glass door next to Michel,
pushing him back a bit. After the man walks off-screen toward the steps,
Michel resumes boxing.

218. MS: low angle of Patricia going up the steps. The man who has just
walked out the glass door now walks past Patricia. She glances at him,
then back at Michel, laughs, and waves him off.

PAS MCU: Michel rubbing his lip with his thumb. He starts to exit through the
glass door.
 Breathless 99

220. QUICK CUT fo MLS: high angle pan of Patricia walking onto a rooftop
terrace.

Zols MCU: a man with a Bell & Howell movie camera.

A VOICE (off): Mr. Parvulesco, why have you chosen Candida as the
title of your novel?”
SECOND VOICE (off):Mr. Parvulesco, if you please . . .
THIRD VOICE (off):Ah, wait a moment. . .

The cameraman begins to film.

222. MS: Parvulesco looking up to the left at the off-screen interviewer. He is

the man who came through the door in shot 217, and is wearing sun-
glasses and a hat like Michel’s.*

SECOND VOICE (off): Fine, I'll let my colleague speak, and then. . .
PARVULESCO: I’m persuaded that the book, in France, will receive,
because of French Puritanism, a rather cool reception.

223. MCU: a Still photographer.

PHOTOGRAPHER (motioning toward his subject, then raising his camera

to snap a shot): Mr. Parvulesco.
A VOICE (off): Mr. Parvulesco, I wanted to ask you, inthe. . .

224. MCU: a seated reporter looking left at the author.

REPORTER: Do you think that one can still believe in love in our age?

225. As in 222.

PARVULESCO (looking screen right this time): Certainly. One can no

longer believe in anything but love, especially in our era.

226. As he finishes his reply off-screen, MCU of a very serious Patricia with
a pen to her mouth. She begins to write some notes.
100 Breathless

A VOICE: Mr. Parvulesco.

ORE MLS: another reporter.

REPORTER: What do you think of that sentence where Rainer Maria

Rilke claims that modern life will drive men and women further
apart?“

228. cu: Parvulesco looking to his right and listening. Patricia’s voice amidst
all the other voices, calls his name to ask a question, but he answers the
previous question.

PARVULESCO: Rilke was a great poet. Therefore, he must be right.

229) MCU: Patricia bending down to write.

230. MCU: Parvulesco. There are many people trying to get his attention by
calling his name. He looks to his left and then to his right.

A VOICE (off ): Mr. Parvulesco.

ANOTHER VOICE (off): Back offa little.

Zo: MCU: the cameraman filming while voices compete off-screen.

FIRST VOICE: Oh, fine, Paris-Match, fine, fine, eh?

SECOND VOICE: Oh, you, Pathé-Journal, eh, go on!*

noes CU: Parvulesco.

233: MCU: profile of a woman in a scarf. The background noise from the
airplanes is very loud.

WOMAN REPORTER (as she speaks there are many voices calling out his
name): Do you think that there’s a difference in the way French and
American women go about love?

234. MCU: Parvulesco, turning to face the woman.

 Breathless 101

PARVULESCO: There’s no comparison between French and American

women. The American woman dominates man. The French woman
doesn’t . . . yet.

A man calls out his name and he looks. Now Patricia calls out and he re-
sponds by looking screen right toward her.

235. MCU: Patricia as in 227.

A VOICE (off ): Mr. Parvulesco.

PATRICIA: What is your great ambition in life?

236. MCU: Parvulesco. He looks at Patricia but does not answer her. A man’s
voice calls his name. He looks right.

MAN’S VOICE (off ): In your opinion who is the more moral: a woman
who betrays or a man who abandons?
PARVULESCO: The woman who betrays.
A VOICE (off):Mr. Parvulesco.

He looks around, reacting to questions.

A VOICE (off ): Are women more sentimental than men?

237. MCU: Patricia, writing, as in 227.

PARVULESCO (off ): Sentiments are a luxury few women can afford.

Patricia looks up from her notepad in reaction to his answer.

238. MCU: another reporter.

REPORTER:* Mr. Parvulesco, do you believe that there’s a difference

between eroticism and love?

239. ms: Parvulesco. A man is holding a microphone near his face. An air-
plane taxis past behind his head.
102 Breathless

PARVULESCO: No, not really. I don’t think so, I think nothing of it,
because eroticism is a form of love and love a form of eroticism.

240. MCU: profile of Patricia with pen in mouth, looking down at her note-
book. A tape recorder slung over a man’s shoulder is in the background.
She looks up.

WOMAN’S VOICE (off, her question bridging the cut): Mr. Parvulesco,
do you believe in the existence of the soul in the modern world?
PARVULESCO: I believe in graciousness [gentillesse].
A VOICE (off, translating into English): | believe in gentleness.
SECOND VOICE (off):Don’t ask stupid questions!
THE WOMAN (off): Oh, go on, you!
PATRICIA: Do you believe that woman has a role to play in modern
society?

241. cu: Parvulesco looking almost on camera axis. He takes the pipe out of
his mouth.

PARVULESCO (pulling down his sunglasses to make eye contact): Yes, if

she is charming, if she has a striped dress, and smoked sunglasses. He
puts his sunglasses back on.
A VOICE (off ): Mr. Parvulesco!

Another man begins to ask a question.

242. MCU: Patricia smiling at Parvulesco while holding her pen to her mouth.

A VOICE (off, bridging the cut): What do you think of Casanova’s asser-
tion that there is no woman who can’t be seduced by making her
grateful enough?
PARVULESCO (off): Cocteau, through The Testament of Orpheus, will
answer. . .”’

243. MCU: a young reporter. He is nervous and does not look up when he asks
his question, but speaks it into the microphone.
 Breathless 103

YOUNG REPORTER: How many men, in your opinion, can a woman

love in her lifetime? I. . . I mean physically.

244. Mcu: Parvulesco looking off-screen left. He flashes open the fingers of
one, then both hands, numerous times, just as Michel had in shot 167.

A VOICE (off ): Excuse me, please, Mr. Parvulesco!

PARVULESCO: More than that.

245. As in 242.

A VOICE (off):There’s no way to work here!

SECOND VOICE (off): Miss, not in the picture.
THIRD VOICE (off): But, Miss, you’re in the picture!
104 Breathless

Patricia smiles at Parvulesco.

PARVULESCO (off ): There are two things important to people. For men
it’s women. And for women it’s money.

246. MCU: low angle of the man with the movie camera. He is not filming.

A VOICE (off ): Ah, you see then, you’re a pessimist.

247. MCU: high angle of Parvulesco looking straight up into the camera.

PARVULESCO: As soon as you see a pretty girl with a rich man, you can
say automatically that she’s a nice girl and he’s a rat.

248. MCU: the photographer fiddling with his camera.

A VOICE (off): In your opinion, is it better to love to live or. . .

JUMP CUT as the photographer snaps a shot.

249. MCU: Parvulesco looking left, then turning right. There are many ques-
tions being hurled at him.

MAN’S VOICE (off ): What is the most intelligent country on Earth?

PARVULESCO: France.

250. MCU: profile of a young woman.

YOUNG WOMAN: Do you like Brahms?*

PANE CU: a portable tape recorder with its reels turning.

PARVULESCO (off): Like everyone: not at all!

YOUNG WOMAN (off): Chopin?
PARVULESCO (off): Disgusting!

20a. MCU: Patricia looking up from her notebook. SUMP CUT on the same
angle.
 Breathless 105

PATRICIA: What is your greatest ambition in life?

253. CU: Parvulesco, staring at Patricia and ignoring all the other questions.

254. MCU: the photographer shooting pictures.

255. As in 253. Parvulesco takes off his sunglasses.

PARVULESCO (very deliberately): To become immortal and then to die.

256. CU: Patricia. Michel’s theme music comes in. She takes off her sun-
glasses, puts the end of the earpiece in her mouth, and slowly turns to
stare straight at the camera. Slow dissolve.*
106 Breathless

Garage and Junkyard, exterior, day

257. Crane shot of Michel in the stolen car driving down a road toward a
garage and used car lot. He turns into the lot, pulls in near the office,
and stops. The music from the previous scene carries over.

258. MLS: Michel in the car. Mansard walks into the shot. He is an older man
wearing an old rumpled shirt, tie, and suspenders. He walks up to the
driver’s side of the car. The music stops.

MICHEL: Mr. Laszlo Kovacs. Claudius Mansard, that’s you?

MANSARD: Yes, Mr. Kovacs. He begins to circle the car, going off-
screen while Michel turns his head to keep him in view.
MICHEL: I called you this morning. They said you’d be here.

259. MCU: Mansard lighting a cigarette.

MANSARD: Yes, Mr. Kovacs.

MICHEL (off): Tony sent me.
MANSARD: Yes, Mr. Kovacs.

260. MLS: across the top of the car taken from the driver’s side. Mansard is
standing by the passenger’s door, while Michel hops out to meet him
dead on.

MICHEL: We met in Nice already, through him, I think.

MANSARD: No, Mr. Kovacs.
MICHEL (taking out a cigarette and putting it in his mouth): Nobody
phoned?
MANSARD: Yes, Mr. Kovacs. They called and said it would be an
Oldsmobile.
MICHEL: Yes, but at the last moment, the deal fell through.
MANSARD (leaning back on the car): And now?
MICHEL: So there you are.

261. MLS: high angle from the rear left-hand side of the car. Mansard gets in
the car and revs it up a few times.
 Breathless 107

MANSARD (turning and looking at Michel): 800,000.°°

MICHEL: Okay. He jumps in over the door on the passenger’s side.

262. MCU: Michel, now suddenly in the driver’s seat, looking at the camera.

MANSARD (off ): The only problem is that I’ll give you the money next
week. j
MICHEL: Ah, no, you're a real bastard.

263. MS: the car from the front. Michel slides over to the passenger side. The
camera tracks with him. Mansard immediately walks up to the car and
shows him the newspaper. The noise from the highway almost drowns
him out.

MANSARD: And you, Mr. Kovacs, who are you? . . . So, I’m not giving
you the money now.
MICHEL: Too bad. Is it 3:00 yet?
MANSARD: 3:15.
MICHEL (standing up in the car): Can | use your phone?

Mansard nods toward his office. Michel walks off-screen left and Mansard
leans back on the car.

264. Ms: doorway to the office. Michel goes through and starts to use the
phone.

265. Ms: from behind Mansard. He has the hood of Michel’s car open and
is tinkering with the engine. He takes something out and puts it in his
pocket. Then he quietly shuts the hood and waits for Michel.

266. ms: Michel on the telephone.

MICHEL (into phone): Is Antonio there?

VOICE ON THE PHONE: No, hejust left.
MICHEL: Ah! Shit!
VOICE ON THE PHONE: He told me to tell you he’d be at the Réamur or
at L’Escale at four o’clock.
108 Breathless

MICHEL: Four o’clock at L’Escale. Fine, thanks. He hangs up the phone

and starts looking through a drawer in the desk on which the telephone
is sitting.

267. QUICK CUT to MCU: high angle of Michel as he rummages through the
desk drawer. JUMP CUT shows him at another drawer.

MANSARD (off ): You’re wasting your time.

Michel looks up at him.

268. MCU: Mansard standing in the doorway looking at Michel.

MANSARD: I keep my money on me.

MICHEL (walking over to him to form a two-shot): Advance me 10,000
francs.
MANSARD (shaking his head): No.

Michel lights a new cigarette from his old one.

MICHEL: 5,000!
MANSARD: No.
MICHEL: 2,500!

Mansard smiles and looks at Michel, who then roughly pushes him out
the doorway.

269. MLS: the car. Michel walks over to it and looks in on the driver’s side.

MICHEL: It won't start anymore! (He lifts the hood. Mansard is pacing
in the background. A young boy walks by.) Hey! You there! (He walks
quickly around the front of the car to the boy and speaks to him. On the
way over he slams the hood shut. The camera cranes up over the car so
as to frame Michel, the boy, and, in the background, Mansard.) Was it
you who disconnected the distributor wire? (The boy points to Mansard
who begins to walk away from Michel. Michel runs after him.) Give me
my machine, jerk!
 Breathless 109

270. QUICK CUT fo LS: the interior of a dark garage. Michel shoves Mansard
against a wall. The camera pans with them. JUMP CUT to the far left
corner of the garage. Michel, with his back toward the camera, is punch-
ing Mansard in the stomach.

MANSARD: You owe me for the phone call.

JUMP CUT. Michel punches him again.

pals QUICK CUT to MS: a different angle on Michel leaving the garage. He
turns to Mansard, who lies just off-screen.

MICHEL: It’s for my taxi.

Intense piano and bongo music. Michel shoves the money he took from
Mansard into his pocket as he hurries out. The camera pans with him,
then fades out to black.
110 Breathless

Taxi, interior, day

aide Fade in. MS: from the back seat of a taxi. The driver’s head is in clearest
focus. The intense music carries over from the previous scene.

MICHEL (off ): Go on, step on it! Step on it! Don’t worry about pedestri-
ans. Hurry, that’s all I ask you. Go on, step on it! In the name of God,
youre dragging!

pa MS: from the front passenger seat of Michel and Patricia sitting in the
back seat. Michel takes a cigarette out of his mouth, and exhales.

MICHEL: Bang! (This interjection cues the cut. He throws both arms up
in the air as he continues speaking now to Patricia.) All of the front
left fender of the Thunderbird ripped off. Me, nothing! (Pointing out of
Patricia’s window, he changes the subject.) Look at the house where I
was born.

274. LS: POV of the old apartment buildings along the street.

MICHEL (off): Across the street, they put up a horrible house.

As the car moves along, the camera reveals a newer 1950s building on
the corner across the street. Its facade is plain and it is built so that it
curves with the street corner.

273. A different angle of the building seen from the car window.

MICHEL (off ): Houses like that really depress me. All the beauty of the
intersection is ruined now.
PATRICIA: Yes.

276. As in 273.

MICHEL (touching Patricia’s face and gently turning it toward him): Yes,
me, I’ve got a feeling for beauty . . . beauty!

Zags As in 272.
 Breathless 111

MICHEL (off): But no, go by way of Chatelet. (To Patricia.) If I’m late
it’s your fault.
PATRICIA (off): Absolutely not.
MICHEL (to the driver after a JUMP CUT, off): Get going, my man,
pass that 403. (JUMP CUT.) Don’t touch your gear shift. What do you
mean dragging yourself behind a 4-CV? (JUMP CUT.) Hang on, look,
you're being passed by a Manurhin. (JUMP CUT.) Put on your turn
signal, we’re turning left.*!

278. MS: from the passenger seat of Michel leaning over Patricia to get out of
the car.

MICHEL: Stop. I'll be back.

CAB DRIVER: Yes, Mister.

Patricia slides to the other side and out of the shot. Through the driver’s
window, Michel can be seen walking down the sidewalk at least a hun-
dred feet. While pedestrians continually cross in front of the camera, we
still see him through the driver’s window as he stops to talk with a man,
turns around, and saunters back to the car. He opens the door and begins
to get in. The frenetic piano music continues. JUMP CUT. He is now sit-
ting next to Patricia.

MICHEL: He left five minutes ago.

JUMP CUT. The car is already moving.

PATRICIA: The one who owes you money?

MICHEL: Antonio Berruti, yes! Your fault! Now it’s double or nothing.
PATRICIA: Why?
MICHEL: I'll explain later.

PibeI As in 277. Michel’s Pov of the driver and the traffic he is racing through.

MICHEL (to the driver, off ): Come on, big daddy, don’t stay behind the
2-CV.* (To Patricia.) Where are you going now?

JUMP CUT, barely changing the road seen through the window.
112 Breathless

PATRICIA (off):To the New York Herald.

JUMP CUT as above.

MICHEL (to the driver, off ): Don’t turn your head. Look ahead of you.

JUMP CUT as Bove

MICHEL (to Patricia, off ): What good does it do you to write articles?
PATRICIA (off ): It does me the good of having money and of being free
from men.

280. As in 278.

PATRICIA (looking out her window): | think Parisian women wear

dresses that are too short; it makes them look like whores.
MICHEL: Come on, are you kidding? It makes you feel like running up
behind them and doing like this. JUMP CUT as he makes the motion
of flipping a skirt up.
PATRICIA: Don’t be so shy.
MICHEL (to the driver, slight JUMP CUT as he points ahead): Stop here!

281. MLS: the front of the taxi. Michel gets out. The camera pans with him as
he runs across the street to the sidewalk, follows a woman for a few feet,
and flips her skirt up. She immediately turns around, while he is already
in retreat toward the cab.

282. QUICK CUT fo MLS: the taxi parked on a street. Michel hurries out,
runs around the front, and meets Patricia as she gets out of the car.

MICHEL (to the driver): We'll be back.

CAB DRIVER: Okay.
PATRICIA: You're not paying?
MICHEL: Come on, hurry up!
 Breathless 113

Paris Passageway, exterior, day

283. LS: an old building. The camera tilts down to the courtyard as Patricia
and Michel walk together through it. They turn left and disappear through
a doorway.

284. A very dark passageway. They are walking slowly to an exit at the end of
the walkway. The camera tracks from behind. Their figures can be barely
discerned at first because of the small amount of light, but as they ap-
proach the exit, they become more visible in LS silhouette.

PATRICIA: Where are we going?

MICHEL: To the Champs Elysées. All Paris knows this corridor. It'll
serve him right. I hate taxi drivers who are scared to scratch their
paint. You see, here, during the war, the Gestapo . . . built a wall to
keep people from slipping out between their legs.
PATRICIA: You know, I was thinking about the girl in France-Soir.
MICHEL: Which girl in France-Soir?
PATRICIA: You know, the one who stayed with her friend on the Céte
d’Azur. You spoke well of her yourself.
MICHEL: Yes, a girl who’s normal, that’s rare.
PATRICIA (as they near the exit): Are you staying with me? I’m going to
the paper.
MICHEL: No, me, I’m going to telephone. Ill stop by to say hello to my
tailor and then I’ll come back to get you.
PATRICIA: Okay.
MICHEL: Ciao, little girl.

Michel exits from the glass door to the right; Patricia goes to the left.

New York Herald Tribune Office, interior, day

285. MLS: Patricia’s friend Van Doude is facing a large window which has
printed across it the masthead of the New York Herald Tribune. He is
talking to a shorter, older journalist who has his back to the window.
Immediately the camera begins panning right. During this lengthy shot it
will in fact make two complete 360-degree circles, scanning the sidewalk,
114 Breathless

following subjects into the office, watching them pass by the reception
desk, and around until it winds up by these two men at the window.

VAN DOUDE (in English): Hey, there she is! I'll introduce you to her.
JOURNALIST (in English): Wonderful.

The camera pans over to the window to reveal Patricia walking down the
sidewalk from the left. Van Doude waves at her and she excitedly waves
back. Camera pans to the door as Patricia walks in. She is in front of the
camera, which tracks her as she walks through the office. She takes off
her sunglasses, nods and smiles in the direction of the two men. Turning
screen right, she stops at a receptionist’s desk. The woman sitting behind
the desk is wearing a T-shirt with the paper’s name imprinted on the front.
The room is very noisy with the sounds of typewriters.

PATRICIA (to the receptionist): Hello, Héléne.

HELENE: Hello, Patricia. You’re late. They’re waiting for you.
PATRICIA: Oh, that’s right. She turns and walks toward the men.
VAN DOUDE (as Patricia approaches, in English): Hello, Patricia. How
is the work?
PATRICIA (taking off her gloves, in English): Oh! Not so bad. I have to
type up my notes now.

The camera slows momentarily and even stops when,she reaches the two
men, framing the group in a three-shot. Van Doude introduces Patricia to
the older journalist.

VAN DOUDE (in English): This is our new star reporter!

JOURNALIST (shaking her hand, then, in English): Great pleasure.
PATRICIA (in English): How do you do, sir?

On its own the pan continues to the sidewalk, revealing Inspector Vital
and his assistant walking by the window and to the door just as Patricia
had done earlier in the shot. Vital says something to his assistant, who
waits outside while the camera keeps panning with Vital as he walks in
the door. He takes a newspaper out of his pocket and approaches the
receptionist’s desk. He stops but the camera keeps circling to reveal the
receptionist.
 Breathless 115

VITAL (showing his badge): Miss Patricia Franchini?

HELENE: She’s over there, I think.

He walks slowly over to Patricia. The camera circles right as Vital moves
through the office, taking everything in with his eyes. Ultimately he stalks
forward on the group three-shot by the window and, with his rolled-up
newspaper, he taps the shoulder of Patricia who is still engaged in her
English conversation with the two journalists. She turns around.

VITAL: Miss Franchini?

PATRICIA (in English): Yes?

Vital shows her his badge and leads her away from the two men and to-
ward the camera. In the background they take their leave of one another,
ignoring Patricia and Vital.

VAN DOUDE (to the journalist, in English): V\l see you later.

Vital puts his badge back into his pocket and turns so that his back is
toward the window. Patricia faces him, and in between them, through the
window, the other detective can be seen waiting.

VITAL: Do you speak French?

PATRICIA (in English): Yes.

286. MCU: Vital holds up a copy of France-Soir so that it covers all of his face
but his eyes. On the front page is a very large picture of Michel with the
headline: ‘The Murderer of Motorcycle Cop Thibault Still on the Run.”

VITAL: Do you know this guy?

Dramatic music starts.

287. cu: reverse angle of Patricia. She reluctantly takes the paper and looks
at the picture.
116 Breathless

PATRICIA (shaking her head): No. She looks up for a moment, then
peers down trying to read the story. She looks up again, a bit fright-
ened, at Vital, but shakes her head ‘“‘no”’ once more.

288. MCU: Vital.

VITAL: Careful, my young lady, one doesn’t joke with the Paris police.

289. MS: the two facing each other. Vital is holding the paper up for her. She
has her sunglasses on.

PATRICIA (taking the paper): Why yes, it’s Michel.

VITAL: Michel Poiccard?
PATRICIA: Yes, I hadn't recognized him. It’s old, this photo.
 Breathless 117

290. MS: Patricia and Vital with the window behind them so we can occasion-
ally see the other detective pacing outside. Music fades out.

VITAL (angrily, as he takes the paper from her): This morning, in front
of this building, you were seen in the company of Michel Poiccard.
PATRICIA: Who saw me?
VITAL: He was driving a Thunderbird 3382 GF-75.
PATRICIA: Yes.
VITAL: Where is he?
PATRICIA: I don’t know.
VITAL: Careful, careful, my young lady.
PATRICIA: No, really, he’s a guy I’ ve seen only five or six times. He seemed
nice. I don’t know where he lives or what he does.
VITAL (irritated): Have you known him for a long time?

291: cu: Patricia, from a 30-degree angle. Her sunglasses conspicuously act
as mirrors. The music fades back in.

PATRICIA: No, I met him in Nice, three weeks ago. I was on vacation.
He told me he came to Paris to see a man who owes him money.
VITAL (angrily, off):Who?
PATRICIA (taking off her glasses): | don’t know. An Italian man. She
smiles.

292. As in 290, slightly further back. The music stops.

VITAL (taking a small notebook out of his pocket): This Michel Poiccard,
do you think you’ll see him again?
PATRICIA: Perhaps. Sometimes he phones me to go out, like this morn-
ing. I don’t know.
VITAL (beginning to write in his notebook): Yes, yes . . . yes, yes. You
have a work permit?
PATRICIA: Yes.
VITAL: You don’t want to have any trouble with your passport?
PATRICIA: No, I don’t want to.
VITAL: Yes, then if you see him, here’s my number. He hands her the
piece of paper from his small notebook and walks off-screen right.
118 Breathless

PATRICIA (to herself ): Danton 01—00. She looks around the room, then
out the window, leaning up against the window to get a better view.
Music cues the cut.

Paris Streets, exterior, day

293 . MLS: Michel coming out ofa newsstand reading a paper. He is wearing
a different hat, a casquette. He flips open the paper and walks down the
sidewalk. He stops and holds the paper so that it hides his face, peeks out
from behind it, and looks across the street.

294. ELS: the two detectives standing in front of the New York Herald Tribune
office. They scurry inside a doorway next to the office as Patricia comes
out. She turns to the left and walks down the sidewalk past the detectives
and does not seem to notice them. The detectives come out of the building
to follow her.

299). CU: Michel drawing the paper down from his face. He looks out, then
brings it back up.

296. As in 294. The detectives split up. Vital walks screen right and his as-
sistant follows Patricia.

297. As in 295. Michel draws the paper down and looks off-screen right.

298. MCU: tracking shot of Patricia walking slowly down the sidewalk. She
turns and looks across the street, and points surreptitiously back at the
detective.

299. As in297. Michel, with cigarette in mouth, looks screen right, then screen
left, then back screen right again while he nods.

300. As in 298. Patricia, evidently having seen Michel nod, walks away from
the camera, which is panning left to follow her.

301 . As in 297. Michel looks left.

 Breathless 119

302. MCU: the detective following left intently.

303. As in 297. Michel pulls the paper down from in front of his face and walks off-
screen right.

304. MLS: the sidewalk through a shop window. Patricia walks by in front of
the window. Just as she passes out of view on the right, JUMP CUT so
that the detective following her enters from the left. When he too passes
out of view to the right, JUMP CUT as Michel, reading a newspaper,
enters in identical fashion from the left. The camera is stationary as the
three characters pass by.

305. LS: a crowded sidewalk taken slightly off its axis. Patricia walks toward
the camera but off-screen right, followed by the detective, followed by
Michel who is still reading the newspaper. Michel’s theme is replaced by
pedestrian noises.

306. Ls: from the opposite angle of another sidewalk. The three are closer
together as they continue walking. The camera pans from right to left,
following them as they move past a group of policemen who are standing
on the sidewalk in the foreground. Sounds of a crowd applauding off-
screen.

307. ELS: from a high balcony. Patricia, followed by the detective, followed
by Michel, walk closer to the street where a parade is in progress. Many
people are lined up along the curb watching. When she gets closer to the
huge crowd Patricia begins to run. The camera pans away from her to-
ward the street to reveal the parade. It is a government procession. A
group of motorcycles in the outline of an upside-down V go by. Another
V group goes by. JUMP CUT as a dignitary’s car comes into view sur-
rounded by a motorcycle escort. The camera pans right on the car. JUMP
CUT as the camera continues panning. JUMP CUT as it pans back
toward the crowd and finds Patricia further up the boulevard, pursued
by the detective, and followed by Michel.”

308. Ls: down the sidewalk of Patricia walking toward the camera and screen
left, trying to dodge the people in the crowd and lose the detective. Michel
follows, reading the newspaper.
120 Breathless

309. Ls: reverse angle. The camera pans right as Patricia runs across the
street toward a movie theater. ‘‘La Marseillaise’’ is playing in the back-
ground. The camera now stops in a LS of the theater entrance with the
booth in the background. Patricia hides behind a pillar in front of the
theater. The detective spies her and runs up to the pillar. She dodges him
and desperately races to the ticket booth, buys a ticket, and slips inside.
The detective rushes toward the booth.

Movie Theater, interior, day

310. Ls: Patricia from the bottom of a stairway leading into the theater. She
turns on her descent to look back to the door at the top of the stairs. Then
she continues down.

314. LS: the dark theater, taken from next to the screen toward the audience.
Above the audience, the light from the projector shines out. Patricia en-
ters, followed by an usher with a flashlight. Patricia sits down. The dia-
logue of an American film can be heard.™ The detective enters soon after
Patricia and sits one row behind her, forcing a surprised spectator to
move over one place. Patricia turns, sees him, and hurries out with the
detective in close pursuit.

giz. MLS: match cut of Patricia walking away from the camera to the rear of
the women’s lavatory. The English dialogue of the film continues without
interruption. When she reaches the washbasin at the back of the lavatory
she turns and looks back out the door, listening for the detective. The
camera pans right and discovers him entering the adjoining men’s room.
He walks toward the urinal, then turns back, watching for Patricia to
leave. A quick pan to the left reveals her still in the lavatory, testing a
door to one of the stalls to her right. When the door opens, she leans
back out to see if anyone is looking and then rushes through it. Pan back
over to the detective facing the wall away from us. Evidently suspecting
something, he suddenly turns around, buttons his coat, and hurries out of
the men’s and over into the women’s lavatory. He opens the door to one
stall, looks in, and shuts it. Then he goes to the farthest door, the one
Patricia had just entered, and opens it.
 Breathless 121

Paris Streets, exterior, day

313. MLS: Patricia jumping out of a ground-floor window. She is carrying her
shoes. After landing on the sidewalk she runs off to the left and hides in a
small doorway while she puts her shoes back on. A loudspeaker announce-
ment can be heard in the background describing the procession still in
progress on the Champs Elysées.

314. MLS: Patricia crossing a street lined with parked cars. She runs toward
the camera, which pans slightly. A JUMP CUT finds her with Michel in a
two-shot in the center of the street. He cups his hands around her face
and looks at her, then releases her face.

PATRICIA: That’s why you said it’s double or nothing a little bit ago?
MICHEL (lighting a cigarette): Yes, a bit for that.
PATRICIA: Let’s go see a western at the Napoléon.
MICHEL: Yes, it’s better to wait till nightfall.

Trumpet music fades in as they walk screen left down the center of the
street. Michel puts his arm around Patricia’s shoulder. The camera pans
with them until it frames the front of a movie theater, where it holds.
Passersby on the sidewalk are conscious of the camera or of the actors.
The music becomes dramatic. The detective appears, running out the
theater door, then stopping on the sidewalk to look both ways. Above the
music gunshots are heard as the detective takes off the wrong way screen
right.

Movie Theater, the Napoléon, interior, day

315. ECU: Patricia and Michel in profile, facing each other. The background
is completely black and the lighting on their faces flickers, as it is coming
from the movie screen. The music and gunshots carry over to become
diegetic. They are accompanied by sounds and dialogue of the film in
progress off-screen. The dialogue is in French and is recited in an incan-
tatory manner.* Michel and Patricia gaze at each other, then kiss long
and gently, then pull back slightly to gaze once more in each other’s eyes.
122 Breathless

MAN’S VOICE (off):

Beware, Jessica,
The bevelled edge of kisses.
The years pass by too swiftly.
Shun, shun the memories that hurt.
WOMAN’S VOICE (off):
You’re wrong, sheriff .. .
Our story is noble and tragic
Like the mask of a tyrant.
A drama neither perilous nor magic.
No cold detail
Can turn our love pathetic.

Fade out.

Paris Streets, exterior, night

316. Fade in. LS: Michel and Patricia coming out of a movie theater. Over the
door is a huge sign with the name of the movie, “Westbound” and a picture of
Virginia Mayo underneath it.°° The camera tilts down from the marquee
to pan with the couple as they walk briskly down the sidewalk. Michel
tosses a coin in the air, tries to catch it, but misses. When he leans down
to pick it up, two passersby speak flippantly to Patricia.

FIRST PASSERBY: Oh, what a pretty girl!

SECOND PASSERBY: Hi, cutie.

Ege LS: a white car pulling up at the curb of a busy, brightly lit street.

318. QUICK CUT fo LS: Patricia jumps out of the car. The camera pans with
her until she enters a drugstore.

31D: LS: the storefront, and above it a tele-news marquee displaying the latest
headline: “‘Dragnet Being Drawn about Michel Poiccard.”’ Dramatic
piano music.

320. MS: Patricia from the back seat of the car. She is sitting in the front reading
France-Soir. A picture of Michel is featured on the front page.
 Breathless 123

MICHEL (off):What do they say?

PATRICIA: I’m still reading.
MICHEL (off ): The cops are looking for me. They’re dumb. I’m one of
the rare few, in France, who likes them well enough. . . . Patricia, I’d
like to hold you. Speak to me, eh!

321. MCU: Michel also from the back seat. He is wearing his sunglasses even
though it is dark out.

PATRICIA (off-screen, cueing the cut): Oh, come on!

MICHEL (lighting a cigarette): What?
PATRICIA (off): You are married.
MICHEL (taking the paper from her): Show me. (He looks at the paper,
then folds it up.) Yeah, a long time ago with a crazy girl. He gives the
paper back to Patricia.

322. As in 320 but slightly closer.

MICHEL: She dumped me. Or me, I dumped her. I don’t remember

anymore.
PATRICIA: I love you very much . . . enormously, Michel.
MICHEL (off ): How do you feel, Patricia, riding in a stolen car?
PATRICIA: And you, when you killed the policeman?
MICHEL (off): I was scared.

323. As in 321. The car has stopped.

PATRICIA (off):How did the police find out I knew you?

MICHEL: Some jerk must have seen us together and squealed on us.
PATRICIA: That’s really bad.
MICHEL: What?
PATRICIA: Informing. I think it’s really bad.

324. As in 320, but the angle is now less oblique so that we see fully out the
windshield. The lighting is darker, too, making Patricia barely visible in
silhouette. Outside the window, as they drive, all the buildings and the
Place de la Concorde are lit up.
124 Breathless

MICHEL (as if reciting a poem, off ): No, it’s normal. Informers inform.
Burglars burgle. Lovers love. Look, the Concorde is beautiful.
PATRICIA: Yes, it’s mysterious with all those lights.
MICHEL (off): It’s stupid to keep this car. We'll change.
PATRICIA: What?
MICHEL (off):We’re going to change cars.

D2 The music stops. LS: the car squealing to stop in front of a parking ramp.
Michel waits for the gate to rise, then drives in, away from the camera
and up the ramp.

326. MLS: inside the parking garage. Michel is getting out of the driver’s seat.
Patricia is standing near the trunk. Lighter music now.

PATRICIA (already starting toward the car directly opposite the place
they parked ): We’|| steal the Cadillac?
MICHEL (off): Ah, sure! Cadillac Eldorado?

2h MLS: the Cadillac from the reverse angle.

PATRICIA (getting into the driver’s seat of the convertible): The keys?
MICHEL (jumping in the right rear seat): You, you drive, I'll hide. In
this garage, they always leave the keys in the cars.

Patricia accidently turns on the wipers and then manages to start the car.
They drive off-screen.

52m: MS: Michel’s POv as Patricia drives down to the exit.

PATRICIA: What do I say to the guy down below?

MICHEL (off):You say good night. Say it in English. That way, he won't
dare to say anything. The French are cowards [trouillards].

They approach the exit.

PATRICIA: What is “trouillard’’?

MICHEL (off): Scared. Are you scared?
PATRICIA: It’s too late now to be scared.
 Breathless 125

PATRICIA (to the guard off-screen, in English): Good night!

GUARD (off): Good night, madame.

The gate rises and they drive out.

a29: LS: large tele-news marquee that reads: ‘‘Paris: Arrest of Michel Poic-
card Is Certain. . . .”’ The camera then pans down to the street. Michel
and Patricia drive into the shot from the right and the camera pans with
them for a slight distance.

330. MS: from the rear left-hand seat of Michel, who is now sitting in the
passenger seat. The shot is framed so that he is off-center to the right;
Patricia is off-screen.

MICHEL: I’ve absolutely got to find Antonio. What’s annoying, here, is

that as soon as you look for someone, you don’t find him.

Xylophone music enters. They are driving along the boulevard Saint
Germain. As they continue slowly, the camera reveals many people walk-
ing and standing on the sidewalk. Just below the Royale Café, Michel
suddenly recognizes a woman on the corner and starts to duck down in
his seat.

MICHEL (as he ducks): Oh, oh!

Bol: MS: a woman on the corner reading the issue of France-Soir with Michel’s
picture and story on the front page. She is the woman from whom he had
taken the money in the earlier scene (shots 61—73). She glances up and is
shocked to see him.

WOMAN: Michel?

Doe As in 330.

PATRICIA (off):Michel, who’s that?

MICHEL (to Patricia after he has sat upright again): Step on it, sweetie
[Minouche}!
PATRICIA (off):What’s “Minouche’’?
126 Breathless

SS 5) ELS: the car approaching a big intersection. It swings screen right and
pulls up by the curb, stopping right in the crosswalk. While cruising to a
halt, its convertible top has mechanically come up, sticking staight in the
air before dropping to cover them. JUMP CUT. Patricia gets out and
runs around the front of the car toward the Pergola. Michel has gotten
out on the passenger’s side.

A Parisian Café, the Pergola, interior, night

334. Extreme high angle LS of the interior of the crowded Pergola. Music is
playing. Michel walks in, followed by Patricia.

See CU: the bartender, taken straight on. He is a slightly older, balding man.

MICHEL (off, to the bartender): Have you seen Antonio?

BARTENDER (glancing at Patricia, enthusiastically): V\l tell you if I can
kiss the doll.

336. cu: Patricia turns her head screen left to look at Michel and then turns
back to the bartender.

MICHEL (off ): That doesn’t depend on me, that depends on her.

Patricia, looking back toward the bartender, smiles.

337, MS: bartender from behind Michel and Patricia. Patricia has given her
hand to him. He kisses it gently, then looks up.

BARTENDER (to Michel): He’s gone to Montparnasse with Zumbach.

Montparnasse, exterior, night

338. MLS: the car pulling up directly under the camera and coming to a stop
at a curb along the boulevard Montparnasse.

3394 MLS: a sidewalk café. Carl sits with his back to the camera.

MICHEL (off, cueing the cut): Carl!

 Breathless 127

Carl gets up, puts on his sunglasses, and walks screen right. Pan with
him till he stands in front of the passenger door of the car. Patricia is still
sitting in the car, but Michel is standing on the driver’s side.

CARL: How are you?

MICHEL: The same! Antonio isn’t with you? Gaby told me that you
would be at the Pergola.
CARL: Yes, he’s at the Select. Wait, here he is.

340. LS: Berruti and his girlfriend on the other side of the street. Berruti waves as
they cross the busy street, dodging traffic.

341. MS: Patricia just shutting the passenger door she has exited from.

PATRICIA: Who’s he?

MICHEL (walking into the frame opposite her): Who? Antonio?
PATRICIA: No, that one!

JUMP CUT as they move.

MICHEL: Patricia Franchini, Carl Zumbach.

Carl walks on-screen, forming a three-shot, takes Patricia’s hand and

kisses it.

342. QUICK CUT fo the same shot from the angle in front of the car. Carl lets
go of her hand. Patricia, lit by a streetlight, stands between and slightly
behind Carl and Michel.

CARL (pointing at Michel): Show your socks. (Michel lifts up his leg,
looks at it, and puts it down.) You're wearing silk socks with a tweed
jacket.
MICHEL: Yes, I like silk.
CARL: Fine, but then no tweed.

Minute JUMP CUT as Michel breaks into a warm smile and waves at
Berruti. Berruti walks in from screen left.
128 Breathless

MICHEL: Berruti!
BERRUTI (slapping Michel on the arm): Hello, amigo!
MICHEL: Hello, kid!
CARL: [ll leave you.
BERRUTI (to Carl as he is leaving): See you later!

Berruti’s girlfriend walks over and stands next to Patricia in the background.

343. cu: Patricia looking at Berruti.

BERRUTI (off ): Well, you wanted to see me. They told me you phoned
several times.

Patricia looks right at Michel.

MICHEL (off): Yes, I’m in trouble.

BERRUTI (off): Eh?
MICHEL (off):Oh God! Oh God!

344. Tight Ms of the four. Michel and Berruti face each other. Patricia stands
slightly behind Michel, while the other woman hovers in the background.
Michel shows Berruti a newspaper. Berruti looks quickly at it, and hands
it back to Michel.

BERRUTI: Shit! . . . Do you have a minute?

MICHEL: Yes.

Berruti turns to his girlfriend and steps a bit out of the shot.

BERRUTI (to girlfriend): Here, you see, it’s that guy.

A man walks in front of the camera.

GIRLFRIEND: What do I say to him?

BERRUTI: Whatever you want, anything . . . I need two minutes.

She leaves. Michel lights a cigarette as Berruti follows her. Only Patricia
and Michel remain.
 Breathless 129

PATRICIA (to Michel): What are they doing?

MICHEL (turns to Patricia): Antonio’s going to take a picture when she
kisses the guy.
PATRICIA: What for?
MICHEL: For blackmail.

345. CU: Berruti’s girlfriend kissing an older man.

346. MS: Berruti from the side looking down into his camera. He has anItalian
newspaper under his left arm. He looks up from the camera, then takes
another picutre.

347. MCU: Patricia looks left toward the sidewalk tables and smiles.

348. MCU: Van Doude with a cigar in his mouth and sunglasses on. He pulls
down his glasses, smiles back at Patricia, and beckons with his finger.

349. MS: Michel and Berruti facing each other. Patricia is between and be-
hind them.

BERRUTI: There we are!

PATRICIA (to Michel): Pll be right back.

They both turn and watch her as she leaves.

BERRUTI (to Michel): Who’s the mouse?

MICHEL: I’m even more in trouble because I’m in love.
BERRUTI: Oh, crap!

350. MLS: Patricia sitting at a café table with Van Doude and an older couple
who can be seen between them. He takes both of Patricia’s hands and
kisses them together. Patricia then turns and blows a kiss toward Michel
who is off-screen.

Joi: cu: Patricia leaning with her chin in her hand and looking pensive, as if
posing for a picture.

VAN DOUDE (off, in English): Why don’t you smile, Patricia? (Patricia
130 Breathless

smiles.) I just left McGregor. He was at Chez Adrien with me and. . .

Monique.”

A siren sounds in the distance. Patricia turns again toward Michel and
blows him another kiss. She does not seem to be very interested in what
Van Doude is saying to her.

San cu: Michel without his sunglasses or hat. He is rubbing his thumb over
his lip in that familiar gesture while staring in the direction of Patricia.
He then puts a cigarette in his mouth, takes a puff, and exhales.

PATRICIA (off, in English): It’s just possible he’ll say it’s fantastic, but it
would certainly surprise me.

Michel takes the cigarette out of his mouth and rubs his lip again.

352. As in 350. A man comes up from behind the group and without a word
tries to sell a portrait of someone to them. Van Doude waves him off.
Patricia is still looking off-screen right toward Michel.

BERRUTI (off ): A million three, I can do it. Perhaps tomorrow. It’s drawn
on which bank, your check?

354. MS: Michel, glasses and hat back on, facing Berruti.

MICHEL: B.N.C.I.
BERRUTI: Show me.

Michel reaches in his breast pocket for the check he got earlier from
Tolmatchoff. He hands it to Berruti who opens and reads it. Patricia walks on
screen and stands between the two men. Berruti glances at her, then down
at the check.

PATRICIA (to Michel): What now?

MICHEL: I don’t know.
BERRUTI (looking up): I can call you where tomorrow?
MICHEL (shrugging his shoulders): | don’t know. The hotels are full of
these fucking tourists. We don’t know where to go. Patricia’s being
watched.
 Breathless 131

3933 MCU: Patricia turns toward Michel.

PATRICIA (excitedly): But in Montmartre! I’ve got a friend. She has a

big apartment. JUMP CUT as she looks toward Berruti.
BERRUTI (off):No, not Montmartre.

JUMP CUT as she looks toward Michel.

MICHEL (off): But no, not Montmartre, I tell you!

356. QUICK CUT back to 354.

PATRICIA: Why?
BERRUTI: We have too many enemies in Montmartre, little girl. No, but
go to Zumbach’s Swedish girlfriend’s place.
MICHEL: She still lives on rue Campagne Premiére?**
BERRUTI: Yes!
MICHEL: Call me at her place tomorrow. Go on, goodbye, amigo!
BERRUTI: Ciao.
Michel and Berruti slap their hands together in the air. Berruti leaves.
Michel walks over to the passenger side of the car, opens the door and
gets in. Patricia follows him in. Michel’s theme cues the next shot.

BD): ELS: high angle on the car driving down the boulevard Montparnasse.
The camera pans slowly while the car gets lost in traffic and in the night.

Studio, interior, night

358: LS: high angle taken from behind Zumbach’s girlfriend, a model, who is
dressed in a white T-shirt and shorts. She opens the front door, revealing
Michel and Patricia.

MICHEL: Antonio sent us. He said we could spend the night here.
MODEL (shutting the door): Yes, very well. (Motioning.) Sit down in
there; I’1l be through in five minutes.

aid, QUICK CUT £o LS: high angle of the apartment. Lights and cameras are
set up. A photographer stands with his camera facing the model, who is
132 Breathless

posing, almost dancing, under the lights. Michel and Patricia walk over
to a couch situated in the rear of the studio.

PHOTOGRAPHER: Okay!

360. MCU: the model posing with her hands clasped behind her head.

PHOTOGRAPHER: Smile!

She smiles.

361. MCU: the photographer from behind the camera.

PHOTOGRAPHER (peeking out from behind the drape, angrily): Smile!

362. MS: Patricia and Michel head-on, sitting on the couch looking at a magazine
together. Michel is wearing his sunglasses. He holds his hat on his knee.

MICHEL: You could do photography; it pays a lot.

363. MLS: from behind the model, who is looking at herself in a hand mirror.
Six photographer’s lights behind her are pointing straight into the camera.

PATRICIA (off ): Oh no! You have to sleep with everyone.

MICHEL (off): Ah!

364. MCU: Patricia and Michel on the couch. He has his arm around her
shoulder.

PATRICIA: I’m thinking of something.

MICHEL: What?
PATRICIA: I can’t decide.
MICHEL: What about?
PATRICIA: If I knew, I wouldn’t be undecided.

She looks at Michel. The music changes to Michel’s theme. Michel does
not respond to her but just continues to read the magazine, still wearing
his sunglasses.
 Breathless 133

365. As in 363, except that the model is now wearing a bikini.

MICHEL (off): And your journalist, then, you’ve dumped him.

PATRICIA (off): Yes!

366. CU: Patricia looking screen right at Michel. She smiles.

MICHEL (off): Why did you speak to him?

367. cu: Michel turning from profile to face the camera before looking down
at the magazine. The right lens of his sunglasses has fallen out.

PATRICIA (off ): I wanted to be sure that I wasn’t in love with him.

368. cu: Patricia looking screen right as in 364.

MICHEL: You do complicate your life, my girl.

Patricia looks screen left toward the model. The photographer’s lights go
out, causing the scene to darken noticeably.

MODEL: It’s over. . .

369. LS: high angle of the room. The shot is split down the middle by a col-
umn on which hangs a cubist painting. To the left, in front of the couch,
stand Michel and Patricia. To the right stand the model and the photogra-
pher who have just finished their work.

MODEL (to the photographer): You'll take me to the Champs Elysées?

PHOTOGRAPHER: Okay! (The photographer crosses left to the other
side of the room and grabs his coat. He retraces his steps to the right
side and leaves with the model.) Goodbye.
MICHEL: Goodbye.
PATRICIA: Goodbye.

Pan with Michel and Patricia who walk to the other side of the room to a
table on which there is a phonograph and some records. Patricia picks up
a record. Michel turns and leans against the table.
134 Breathless

MICHEL: What record are you putting on?

370. Cu: the phonograph with a record on it. Patricia’s hand places the needle
on the record.

PATRICIA (off ): It’s Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto. Do you mind?

MICHEL (as the music begins, off): No, that one I like.
PATRICIA (off ): I thought you didn’t like music.
MICHEL (off ): Only this record. My father played clarinet.
PATRICIA (off): Ah, yes?

S41. ECU: the cover of a book. The camera shakily pans down, revealing the
name of the author, Maurice Sachs, and the title Abracadabra.”

MICHEL (off ): Sure, my father, he was a genius on the clarinet.

The camera continues to pan down the book. Michel’s thumb holds the
cover next to a quote: ‘“‘Nous sommes des morts en permission’ [ ‘‘We’re
all dead men on leave’’ ]. Below those words, the name ‘‘Lenine.”’

PATRICIA (off):We're going to sleep?

MICHEL (off): Yes.

Wee MCU: Patricia looking screen right at Michel.

PATRICIA: It’s sad to fall asleep. You have to. . . separ. . .

MICHEL (helping her with her grammar, finishing the word): . . . ate.
PATRICIA (continuing sadly): . . . to separate. They say, ‘‘sleep to-
gether,” but it’s not true. She turns, looks down sadly, then back at
Michel, and directly into the camera. Fade out.

373: Fade in. MLS: low angle on an interior balcony with a curtain pulled shut
across the opening.

MICHEL (singing): Patricia.

Patricia opens the curtains, looks out, and flips her dress over the edge of
the balcony.
,
ee att
‘hg Ogg
1gem
ied te? tes
136 Breathless

PATRICIA (singing back): What is it?

374. MS: Michel sitting in a chair, with his back to the camera, wearing only a
shirt and undershorts. He props his stockinged feet up onto a table, flips
his hat on, and dials the phone.

MICHEL (looking up from the phone to Patricia): Nothing.

Dias This long take begins on the second floor with MLS of Patricia in front of
a huge mural on the wall. Pan with her as she walks left to a table. She
picks up a belt and an earring; then, she moves toward the camera into
MS before descending the stairs to the left. The camera pans with her.

MICHEL (off): Patricia.

PATRICIA (walking down the stairs and putting on her earring): What?
MICHEL (off ): Come here. (The camera swirls to keep her in view as she
descends. Then it frames her and Michel in Ls from up on the balcony.
The angle on the studio is similar to that in 368. Michel is on the phone,
wearing his sunglasses. He reaches in his coat pockets and hands her
some money.) Youre going to buy France-Soir and a bottle of milk.
PATRICIA: Okay. The camera pans with her as she skips to the left of the
pillar dividing the studio, to get her purse. The radio is tuned to a news
program.
RADIO VOICE: The Soviet delegation made a sensation with what is be-
ing called acompletely categoric position. They don’t have the right. . .

Patricia takes out a piece of paper, looks at it thoughtfully, glances to-

ward Michel, and sets her purse down.

MICHEL (off):What time is it?

PATRICIA (picking up her sweater to leave): Five o'clock. Patricia crosses
back in front of the pillar and passes Michel on her way to the hall.
Pan with her as she starts to exit the front door.
MICHEL (to himself and referring to the phone): Always busy.

Patricia changes her mind and returns to the studio. The camera again
pans with her, revealing Michel sitting at the table in the same position
as before.
 Breathless 137

PATRICIA: Michel?
MICHEL (irritated): What! He picks up the phone again.
PATRICIA: Nothing.
MICHEL (irritated): France-Soir!
PATRICIA: I’m just looking at you. She walks back through the hall and
exits. The camera pans with her.

Rue Campagne Premiére, exterior, day

376. LS: pan with Patricia walking down a busy sidewalk from left to right and
reading the newspaper.

377. QUICK CUT to Ms: Patricia walking and reading France-Soir, but this
time her screen directionis from right to left. She slows to read in front of
a woman in a ticket booth who is selling lottery tickets.

WOMAN (calling out): Lucky day! Try your luck! Take a ticket!

Café, interior, day

378. QUICK CUT fo MLS: Patricia sitting at a bar. The bartender faces her in
profile.

PATRICIA: A Scotch.
BARTENDER: I don't have any.
PATRICIA: A coffee then.

The bartender immediately turns to get her coffee. Patricia wearily puts
her head down on the bar.

379. McuU: profile of Patricia talking into a phone, apparently from her same
position at the bar. Dramatic music swells.

PATRICIA: Hello! Danton 01—00? Inspector Vital, please. Waiting for

Vital to come to the phone, she drops the phone from her ear to her
mouth and takes a deep breath.
138 Breathless

380. QUICK CUT. As in 378. Patricia is sitting at the bar alone, phone to
her ear.

PATRICIA: Hello. . . Patricia Franchini. . . . You know, the guy you’re

looking for, I just saw him. He’s at 11, rue Premiére Campagne. Yes,
11, rue Campagne Premiére. Hello . . . Hello. . . Hello?
Vital has evidently already hung up. The music has stopped. Patricia
stares blankly for a moment, returns the phone to its place, grabs her
paper, turns away from the bar, and runs out. The camera pans with her
through the window of the bar as she hurries down the sidewalk.

Studio, interior, day

381. MS: high angle of Michel resting his head on the desk. He turns his head
right, then left. The record player by his head is playing Mozart.

382. LS: high angle of Patricia entering the apartment. It is framed so that a
pillar divides the shot in half, with Michel far over to one side and Patricia
on the right. She walks over to Michel, wakes him up, and gives him the
paper. The camera then pans with her as she moves to a closet in the fore-
ground, directly below the camera. She takes off her sweater and walks
back over to Michel, the camera once again panning with her. When she
reaches the desk, she sets the bottle of milk down next to him. He is now
sitting on the table. He puts on his sunglasses, picks up the bottle of milk,
and drinks from it. Patricia turns and leans up against the edge of the
table right next to him.

MICHEL: Are you thirsty?

PATRICIA: No.
MICHEL: Antonio’s coming in a quarter of an hour. He just called. We’re
leaving for Italy, my little girl! He starts to walk toward the camera
while drinking milk from the bottle. He circles around the pillar in the
foreground; her question makes him turn back toward Patricia who still
leans against the desk in the far plane.
PATRICIA: Me, I can’t go.

JUMP CUT So that Michel is on the other side of the pillar approaching
Patricia.
 Breathless 139

MICHEL: Oh, yes you can! I’m taking you. Berruti is lending me his
Simca Sport with an Amedeo Gordini motor.

JUMP CUT as Patricia sits down in the desk chair.

PATRICIA: Michel, I called the police. I told them that you were here.

383. MLS: low angle of Michel and Patricia.

MICHEL ( putting his hands around her throat): You're crazy. Isn’t every-
thing okay?
PATRICIA (walking away): Yes, things are going great! (As she moves
toward some photographer’s lights, the camera tracks with her. She
turns one on and off in her face.) No, things aren’t going well. (Patricia
turns to look at Michel behind her.) { no longer feel like leaving with you.
MICHEL (putting down his milk): 1 knew it. He turns his back to her.
PATRICIA (walking farther away): | don’t know.
MICHEL (off ): When we talked, I talked about myself, and you about
yourself...

The camera tracks with Patricia in MS as she strolls around the room,
ultimately making two complete circles. At this point Michel is no longer
in the shot. They are speaking to themselves and simultaneously.

PATRICIA: I feel stupid.

MICHEL (off): . . . while you should have talked about me, and me
about you.
PATRICIA (speaking as she continues to walk slowly around the room.
The camera never stops tracking with her.): 1 don’t want to be in love
with you. That is why I called the police. I stayed with you because I
wanted to be certain that I was in love with you . . . or that I wasn’t in
love with you. And because I am mean to you . . . (Michel turns the
record player off.) . . . it proves that I am not in love with you.” She is
now back at the table with Michel.
MICHEL: Say that again!
PATRICIA: And because I am mean to you, . . . (The camera pulls back
as she turns to walk away again.) . . . it proves that I don’t love you.
140 Breathless

MICHEL (in the background): They say there is no happy love, but the
opposite’s true.
PATRICIA (talking to herself over his speech): If loved you . . . She is
walking in MS in the same path as before around the room. His speeches
are all off-screen to himself interlaced with hers to herself.
MICHEL (off): You thought so?
PATRICIA: Oh! It’s too complicated!
MICHEL (off ): On the contrary. There is no unhappy love.
PATRICIA (angrily): I wish people would just leave me alone!
MICHEL (off ): I don’t believe in independence, but I am independent.
PATRICIA: Maybe you love me?
MICHEL (softly, off): You, you believe it, and you aren't.
PATRICIA: That’s why I turned you in.
MICHEL (softer, off ): I am superior to you.
PATRICIA: Now you're forced to leave. Patricia has returned to the table
for the third time now so that Michel is now once again in the shot.
MICHEL: You're crazy. (Flicking the back of her neck in disgust, he goes
on.) That’s a lamentable argument! Michel now walks away screen
right retracing Patricia’s circular path but backwards. He lights a
cigarette, and tosses the match away.
PATRICIA (off): You are an idiot.
MICHEL (interrupting her): It’s like girls who sleep with everybody and
won't sleep with the only guy who’s really in love with them. . . (He
tucks in and then buttons his shirt as he walks.) . . . under the pretext
that they have slept with everybody.
PATRICIA (off ): Why don’t you leave? (Michel throws his arms up in frus-
tration.) I’ve slept with many men. You mustn’t count on me. But leave,
Michel, what are you waiting for?

Michel has changed direction. He pats his own head as he moves more
quickly back toward Patricia.

384. cu: profile of Patricia looking screen right at Michel.

MICHEL (off): No, I’m staying! I’m all messed up. Anyway, I feel like
going to prison.
PATRICIA: Youre crazy.
 Breathless 141

Pan over to a CU of Michel looking screen left.

MICHEL: Yes. No one will talk to me. I’ll look at the walls.
PATRICIA: You see, you said that. . .

385. QUICK CUT on his interjection to MLS of Michel and Patricia by the
table. Michel is already on his way out the door.

MICHEL: Oh, shit! . . . Berruti!

Rue Campagne Premiere, exterior, day

386. QUICK CUT to LS: Michel flags down Berruti just outside the studio
apartment as he drives up in a convertible.

MICHEL: Berruti!
BERRUTI: Hello, amigo. Wait, wait, wait, I'll go park.

Berruti drives right past Michel who runs after the car. Pan right to a LS
down the street.

387. QUICK CUT to MS: Berruti’s car coming into the frame, this time from
screen right. Michel runs up just after it, to stand next to Berruti, the
driver.

MICHEL: Beat it, the cops are coming in five minutes!

BERRUTI (handing a briefcase to Michel): But I brought you your
money!?
MICHEL (taking the briefcase): Beat it, that little American squealed
on me.
BERRUTI (grabbing Michel’s arm): Shit . . . get going then, come on!
MICHEL: No, I’m staying! You, buzz off!
BERRUTI (opening the door): Don't be stupid. Climb in here.

388. QUICK CUT to MCU: Michel, with his sunglasses on.

142 Breathless

MICHEL (looking down): No, I’m staying. (He looks up.) Yes, I’m beat,
I’m tired, I feel like sleeping. He looks down again at Berruti and
laughs.
BERRUTI (off ): You’re completely crazy. Come on, get in!

389. MLS: Berruti and Michel from the sidewalk. Michel has the briefcase
under his arm.

MICHEL: No. The police, I don’t care, I'd save my life. What bothers
me, right now, is that I shouldn’t think about her and I can’t manage not
to.
BERRUTI (reaching into the glove compartment): Do you want my auto-
matic? He tries to hand the gun to Michel, then forces it on him.
MICHEL (throwing it in the back seat): No.
BERRUTI: I told you not to be stupid.
MICHEL: Beat it!

390. LS: a black sedan driving up the street toward the camera.
 Breathless 143

391. QUICK CUT to Ms: Berruti reaching in the back seat for the gun and
Starting to toss it to Michel off-screen.

S02. High angle shot of detectives jumping out of their sedan. They run around
to the front of it, holding guns.

393: As in 391. Berruti throws the gun to Michel.

394. MLS: Michel walking quickly down the street. The gun lands in front of
him, he bends down to pick it up, and turns around to look at Berruti.

SERy. As in 393. Berruti drives off screen left.

oO: As in 394. Michel gets up, carrying the briefcase in one hand, the gun in
the other.

3
Ss
, ee
144 Breathless

397. MS: three detectives, nearly head on. The closest one is Vital. He extends
his arm and fires one shot at Michel.

398. ELS: Michel running down the street, holding his lower back where he
has been shot. The camera tracks behind him as he stumbles from one
side of the street to the other, supporting himself on parked cars as he
goes. Michel’s theme music.

399. Mcu: Patricia, head-on, running after Michel with a worried look on
her face.

400. As in 398. Michel stumbles, trying to turn around to see his pursuers. He
falls, gets back up, and continues running all the way down the block,
growing weaker and weaker while the camera trails fifty feet behind him.
 Breathless 145

At the intersection he falls flat on his stomach in the crosswalk. The camera
continues to move in closer on him as the music peaks and drops off.

401. MS: Patricia desperately running down the middle of the street toward
Michel.

402. mcu: looking down on Michel, now lying on his back. He still has on his
sunglasses. His hand wipes across his face, knocking the cigarette away.
Smoke rises from his mouth. The legs of three detectives enter to surround
Michel’s body. A second later, Patricia’s legs follow to stand to the right of
Michel. The trumpet music stops.

403. cu: Patricia holding her hand over her mouth and looking down at Michel.
Slowly she pulls her hand away and gazes without expression down at
Michel.
146 Breathless

404. cu: Michel lying on the ground looking up at Patricia. He is no longer

wearing his sunglasses. He begins to make the faces he made at her
earlier in the film (shot 133): first opening his mouth wide forming “ah,”
then baring his clenched teeth as much as possible for “‘eeh,”’ and finally
putting his mouth in the form of “ooh.”

405. As in 403. Patricia looks solemnly down at him, absently touching her hair.

406. As in 404.

MICHEL: That’s really disgusting [c’ est vraiment dégueulasse|. He puts

his left hand over his eyes. The hand then slowly slides off his face. His
eyes are now shut.
PATRICIA (as his head falls limply to the right and as his theme plays a
final time, off): What did he say?

407. CU: Patricia.

VITAL (off):He said, “‘ You are really a bitch [une dégueulasse].”

PATRICIA (turning to look straight into the camera and rubbing her
thumb over her lip as Michel used to): What is ““dégueulasse”? Her
theme plays as she stares straight ahead, then Patricia finally turns
away from the camera so that the back of her head fills the screen.
Fade out.
 Notes on Continuity
Script

1. The French version of the film bears a title shot that includes the censorship
visa number, the title A bout de souffle, and the following phrase: “‘Ce film
est dédié 4 la Monogram Films” [This film is dedicated to Monogram
Pictures]. No other credits appear.

2. The film takes place in summer, presumably in the very moments during
which it was shot, August-September 1959. A calendar appearing in the
background in shot 266 would verify this. The first sequence in Marseille is
set alongside the Vieux Port. Many of the boats that one sees and hears in
the background are doubtless headed for the Chateau d’If. Indeed, we can
assume this is the destination of the American couple whose car Michel
steals. Truffaut’s treatment, appended to these notes, would tend to sub-
stantiate this.

3. This is a colloquial construction not unlike “‘See you later, alligator.”

4. The English subtitles translate ““Le crocodile est sauté” as “My goose is
cooked,”’ but in fact it refers to the apparatus, “alligator clips,” used to hot-
wire cars.

5. Michel is seen here in his shirtsleeves, his coat having inexplicably come
off. One can assume a continuity error.
148 Breathless

6. Equal to | franc, 80 centimes today, or only about $0.40.

Ts Michel here corrects her grammar. The troublesome word in French is

“rappeler”’ (remember).

. The Pergola is a café near the Métro Mabillon by the Boulevard Saint
Germain, not too far from the Royale mentioned in shot 63, which stood
at the intersection of the Boulevard Saint Germain and the rue de Rennes
until it was transformed into a drugstore.

. Equal to 50 francs today, or about $10.

. This is the first use of the term ““dégueulasse,”’ which will recur frequently.
Its meaning varies from “disgusting” (as an adjective) to “bitch” or “‘heel”’
as a substantive.

Ld: The cinematographer Raoul Coutard took this shot from within a post of-
fice mail cart. Hidden by canvas, he was pushed along the street by Godard.
Small holes were cut out from the canvas for the camera lens.

42. The poster advertises a film then playing in Paris, /0 Seconds to Hell,
directed by Robert Aldrich (1959).

13. Godard was at this time a member of the editorial board of Cahiers du
Cinéma.

14. This and two other extended tracking shots (in the Herald Tribune office
and in the Swedish model’s studio) were purportedly shot handheld by
Coutard while he was pushed around in a wheelchair.

LS. Bob Montagné is a reference to the character “Bob,” the gangster hero in
Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1956 Bob le flambeur. Melville will appear later in
Breathless as Parvulesco, the writer.

16. “Elysées 99-84.” Michel uses the Swiss convention in speaking these
numbers: “nonante-neuf, huitante-quatre.” Later he will employ the stan-
dard French formula for speaking numerals.
 Notes on the Continuity Script 149

Lie Laszlo Kovacs, a young cinéphile, was in Paris during the shooting of
Breathless. Godard liked and adopted his name for the movie. He later
became a well-known cinematographer in America.

18. The Metro stop is George V, right at the Champs Elysées.

19. The Harder They Fall is a boxing film made by Mark Robson in 1956.
Belmondo was a former boxer and will, in fact, demonstrate the sport in
two later scenes.

20. This scene recalls a similar incident in The Enforcer, a 1951 Warner Broth-
ers film directed by Bretaigne Windust, starring Humphrey Bogart.

vA es “Vous” and “‘tu’’ are respectively the formal and the informal second-person
pronouns in French.

22. The book he gives her is undoubtedly The Wild Palms by William Faulkner,
for it is indeed about a woman who dies after an abortion, and it is the
book Patricia later quotes from (shot 169).

25: In 1959 Orly was the principle international airport serving Paris.

24. The Claridge is a luxury hotel.

Zo. This line could be translated ‘I always fall for the wrong dames,”’ making
explicit the reference to Bogart in The Maltese Falcon (1941).

26. InaMonth, ina Year is the title of a 1957 novel by Francoise Sagan, an author
whose works will be referred to in the scene with Parvulesco as well.

2). The Picasso painting in question is The Lovers, 1923.

28. The Picasso reproduced here is an engraving from the 1933—1935 period.

20. While many compositions in Breathless purportedly mimic shots from

films Godard loved, this one is unmistakable; it comes from Samuel Fuller’s
Forty Guns, 1957. Godard in fact described the quoted scene in detail in
his review of Forty Guns. See Godard on Godard, p. 62.
150 Breathless

30. The Renoir painting is Head of a Young Girl, 1894.

au A postcard-sized reproduction of a Paul Klee painting (The Timid Brute,

1938) is centered on the wall in this and several later shots. Godard’s taste
for Klee may stem from their shared Swiss origins. Underneath the Klee,
and visible in many of the subsequent shots, is a copy of Silver Screen that
appears to have Dean Martin on the cover.

32. Michel here gives only the first word of the catch phrase in French, ““Dé-
cidément, je n’ai pas de chance.”

a2. The “‘bac”’ refers to the ‘‘baccalauréate,”’ the degree conferred after exami-
nation at the end of high school. It is usually awarded at nineteen years of
age and permits entrance into higher education.

34. Lausanne and Geneva are the two principle French-speaking cities in Switzer-
land. Once again Godard alludes to his native country.

33. The Wild Palms was published by Faulkner in 1939. This novel is surely
the one Van Doude handed Patricia earlier (shot 104) since it concerns a
woman who dies after an abortion. Patricia may be imagining what life
would be like, living on the run with Michel in the manner of the doomed
protagonists of The Wild Palms.

5G; Nadia Tagrine is a moderately well known French pianist.

aL Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog was Dylan Thomas’s posthumously

published autobiography, 1955. Thomas lived from 1914 to 1953.

38. Belmondo was himself a boxer before turning to acting.

39. This discussion of shopping does occur in fact in front of the elegant Christian
Dior store on the avenue Montaigne. An antique Citroén is parked in front
of it. Prisunic is a chain store featuring inexpensive items.

40. The man who informs on Michel is played by none other than Godard, here
literally stepping in to direct the plot of his film.
 Notes on the Continuity Script 151

41. On the left side of the page a second story can be read. Its headline says:
“Money given to prostitutes belongs to them. No one can reclaim it.”

42. “Candida” is a variant of the French term for ingenuous or innocent. Vol-
taire’s Candide (1759) depicts the adventures of just such an innocent in
“the best of all possible worlds.”

43. Parvulesco is played by the director Jean-Pierre Melville, a precursor of the

New Wave, famous for his love of American film noir.

. Rainer Maria Rilke, 1875—1926, the German poet and mystic.

45. Paris-Match is a popular glossy magazine. Pathé-Journal is the newsreel

company increasingly responsible in this period for supplying footage to
television.

46. This journalist is played by André S. Labarthe, a young critic who began
making films and TV programs about this time. He would play a major role
in Godard’s later film, Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live, 1961).

47. Jean Cocteau was at this time in the midst of his final film, Le Testament
d’ Orphée. Godard had dedicated his own first short film to Cocteau.

48. Aimez-vous Brahms? was the title of the most recent Francoise Sagan novel. It
appeared in 1959. It should be recalled that Godard discovered Jean Seberg
in Otto Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse (1958), an adaptation of another Sagan
novel.

49. This is the film’s second and last dissolve. The first occurred at the end of
shot 12.

50. Equal to 8,000 francs today, or about $1,700.

=F A “403” is a type of Peugeot, while a “4-CV” is a model made by Renault. A

‘“‘Manurhin’ is a brand of motor scooter.

Sas A “2-CV” is a small Citroén.

152 Breathless

a2: The occasion of the parade on the Champs-Elysées was in fact a joint visit
by De Gaulle and Eisenhower to the tomb of the unknown soldier at the Arc
de Triomphe. It took place on September 2, 1959. One long shot showing
DeGaulle and Eisenhower in the same shot as Michel and Patricia was
removed by the censors.

54. The dialogue is from Whirlpool, a 1949 film noir directed by Otto Preminger,
starring Gene Tierney and Richard Conte.

55. The dialogue presumably coming from the screen is actually the recitation
of two poems. The first is by Louis Aragon and the second by Guillaume
Apollinaire. Godard was fascinated by the Aragon poem, quoting it as
early as 1950 in a review of Max Ophuls’s La Ronde, then again in 1959 in
a review of Jacques Rozier’s Blue Jeans. (See Godard on Godard, pp. 20
and 115.)

56. The film playing at the Napoléon was purportedly Westbound, a 1958 film
by Budd Boetticher, one of the favored directors of Bazin and the critics at
Cahiers du Cinéma.

my The dialogue as reported by L’Avant-Scéne Cinéma is quite different. Ac-

cording to their script, Van Doude and Patricia argue about her love or lack
of it for him. Since this dialogue is all off-screen (no lip-sync) it is possible
that two versions of the film circulated. I have not encountered a version
substantiating the Avant-Scéne script. Theirs may simply be in error, for
the Ballard script agrees with the prints I have studied.

58. Rue Campagne Premiére is in the fourteenth arrondissement, near Mont-

parnasse. Those who hang out in the Montparnasse area have traditionally
been at odds with those at Montmartre, on the other side of Paris.

59, Maurice Sachs (1906-1944) was a literary figure of the period between the
wars who caused a number of scandals. Michel’s attitudes recall Sachs’s
often childish anarchy.

60. Marcel Martin (in Cinéma, no. 46, May 1960) feels that Patricia’s dialogue
forms a parody of Jacques Prévert’s style, though a parody that adopts at
the same time Prévert’s iconoclasm and love of youth.
 The Original
Treatment
Francois Truffaut

| ome Truffaut composed this handed Godard not a treatment but a

treatment in 1956. After the suc- snippet from the newspaper. We will
cess of his 400 Blows, when he now be able to see just how faithful
had other projects to pursue, he Godard was to Truffaut’s rather de-
handed the idea to Godard who sub- tailed idea. Even small “throwaway”
mitted it, along with three other treat- moments, such as the motorcyclist
ments, to Georges de Beauregard. being knocked down as Michel mean-
Doubtless Truffaut’s name, recently ders toward the Inter-America Travel
made famous, impressed the producer Agency (shots 81—83), are foreseen
enough for him to accept it. in the treatment. Godard’s major addi-
Part of the mythology surrounding tion to the script, it is quickly appar-
Breathless has it that Godard took ent, is the tremendous enlargement of
nothing from the treatment save Truf- the scene in Patricia’s bedroom, which
faut’s name, which he parlayed into Truffaut renders in a single paragraph.
backing for the film. Enlarging on This treatment was published in
some of Godard’s own statements, vir- L’ Avant-Scéne Cinéma, no. 79 (March
tually all the initial reviews of the film 1968). The translation, the first in En-
mention that Truffaut lent his name glish, and long overdue, is by Dory
but little more. Some suggest that he O’Brien.
154 Breathless

“We're going to talk about very nasty things. . .

”

—Stendhal
Marseille, a Tuesday morning.
Lucien is pretending to read Paris Flirt at a sidewalk café at the bottom of the
Cannebiére. In reality, he is watching the traffic in front of the Vieux Port.
Near the boats that take tourists to view the Chateau d’If, a girl signals to
Lucien. She indicates a convertible with the insignia “U.S. Army” that is at that
moment pulling into a parking spot. The occupants, an American officer, his
wife, and their children, go to buy tickets for the Chateau d’If tour. They are
watched by Lucien and the girl, who are nonetheless pretending not to know each
other.
As soon as the boat has departed, Lucien approaches the car—a DeSoto con-
vertible. He inspects the car as if he were the owner, checking the tires and oil.
The girl asks Lucien to take her with him but he refuses. Getting behind the
wheel, he drives off after hotwiring the car.
Some Hours Later, we see Lucien on the highway. Driving a stolen car is
apparently nothing special to him, for he seems quite at ease. Alone at the wheel,
he bellows snatches of songs at the top of his lungs.
He catches up with and drives alongside an Alfa Romeo driven by a pretty
young woman. He asks her if she is not, by chance, Mrs. Lucien Poiccard. She
shakes her head no. Lucien quips that this is a shame since he is Lucien Poiccard.
A little farther on, we see Lucien slow down to pick up two girls who are
hitchhiking. As he passes them, however, he finds them too ugly and speeds up
again.
From time to time he talks aloud to himself. Through these fragmentary re-
marks we learn about Lucien’s current projects.
1. To get hold of some money in Paris from a more or less shady business
deal. (As the film progresses, we will, from time to time, learn details of Lucien’s
activities from the brief conversations he has with people he runs into. Basically
Lucien engages in some kind of “‘trafficking.’’ But what kind of traffic? He is
secretive about this even with Patricia.)
2. In Paris, Lucien wants to get back in touch with a woman named Patricia
whom he hopes to persuade to go abroad with him.
But a third problem is about to complicate Lucien’s plans. As the sun sets, he is
driving north toward Paris, in the vicinity of Sens. Annoyed by a “Deux
Chevaux” that won’t dare pass a slow truck, Lucien overtakes both vehicles on a
curve and on a hill.
 The Original Treatment 155

The wheels of his car slide far over the center line. A whistle blasts. A motor-
cycle cop lurking at the top of the hill signals to him to pull over, but Lucien, in
his stolen car, instead rushes wildly away.
There is a pursuit of Lucien by the motorcycle cop ending in a small village.
Lucien has taken a short cut. It’s a cul-de-sac. His motor dies. Lucien pulls from
the glove compartment the revolver which he had found there just minutes be-
fore, stashed underneath some car wax. The motorcycle cop pulls out his gun.
Everything happens at once. Lucien shoots at the cop almost before realizing it.
He is furious with himself. The last thing he needed was an incident like this on
his record.
We Find Lucien Again in Paris, early in the morning. He must have been
hitchhiking, because a small Danish car drops him off at Saint Michel.
Lucien goes into a telephone booth, then changes his mind and hangs up with-
out making a call. He leaves and starts to walk toward the Seine. He is wearing
only a shirt, having left his jacket in the car after shooting the cop.
He buys a morning paper. There is no news yet of the murder. Lucien goes into
a small residential hotel on the Seine. He asks if Miss Patricia Franchini is there.
The doorman, in the process of washing the steps, says no. Lucien insists. But
Patricia is not there—the key hanging on the board is proof. Lucien says he is
going to leave a message, but when the doorman is not watching, he grabs the
key. He enters Patricia’s room. The bed has not been slept in. Lucien searches all
around the room. He tries on a jacket. Too small. He finds some change in a
drawer, but they are American coins. He leaves the room after washing his face.
We watch him enter the Royale Saint-Germaine and ask the price of eggs. He
counts his money. He doesn’t have enough. He orders two eggs with ham, saying
that he’ll be back in a minute.
Lucien crosses the boulevard Saint-Germain, passes in front of the Café Hune
and enters the courtyard of an apartment building next to the Café Flore. We then
see him in the corridor outside the maids’ rooms.
Behind a door Lucien hears a woman’s voice singing one of the melodies from
La Belle Héléne. Lucien enters quietly without knocking.
A girl in pajama bottoms is in the process of drying her hair. She turns around,
but does not seem surprised. We learn that she and Lucien lived together seven or
eight months ago. She now makes public relations films, works in TV, and has
abandoned the Latin Quarter. Lucien is less explicit about himself. He has not
been doing so badly. He should be picking up two and a half million at noon. In
the meantime, could she loan him two or three thousand francs? She replies that
she doesn’t have enough. Lucien invites her to breakfast, hoping that she will pay.
156 Breathless

She can’t; she is in a hurry. As she pulls her jersey over her head, Lucien takes the
opportunity to extract some bills from her bag. He then tells her that he will see
her soon and takes off. It is eight o’clock in the morning, Wednesday.
Around Ten o’Clock, Lucien enters a travel agency on the Champs Elysées.
He has bought a second-hand jacket and dark glasses. Lucien asks one of the
employees if Michel is there. The employee tells him that Michel will not arrive
until eleven. Lucien replies that he will drop in again and asks the address of an
American newspaper, the New York Herald Tribune.
Fade in on Lucien on his way to the New York Herald. He goes into the lobby,
addresses a girl in a yellow jersey behind the information desk, and asks if a Miss
Patricia Franchini doesn’t work there. The girl tells him that she should be on the
Champ Elysées selling papers. Lucien leaves again and walks down the Champs
Elysées.
He spots a girl in a yellow jersey. She tells him that Patricia is on the opposite
sidewalk, near the Pam-Pam.
Lucien crosses the Champs Elysées. He pushes aside a student selling pam-
phlets who asks him, “Do you have something against youth?” Lucien snubs
her, saying that in fact he does hate young people and loves old people instead.
Lucien sees Patricia walking ten yards ahead of him. He follows her for a bit.
Sensing that she is being followed, she turns around. She is wearing a yellow
jersey with the initials of the New York Herald on the front. She also wears an
American sailor hat pulled low on her forehead.
She is in blue jeans. Lucien buys a paper from her. She stares wide-eyed at
him: What brings him to Paris? She had thought he was in Nice.
Lucien replies that he has come to Paris to do business. He suggests that
Patricia go with him to Italy (when he is finished). We understand that they lived
together some weeks ago on the Cote d’Azur, where Patricia was spending her
holiday. She won’t say “‘yes” or “‘no” to Lucien. She’ll have to see. She must
register at the Sorbonne and will perhaps be writing some articles for the New
York Herald.
They arrange to meet that evening, in a café on the Boulevards, where she
will be.
We stay with Lucien, who returns to the travel agency. On a small street in
front of the Biarritz, he witnesses a fatal accident: a man on a motor scooter is hit
by a car. The bloody face of the man makes Lucien recall the motorcycle cop. He
buys France-Soir where, on the second page, he finds an account of his murder.
The cop is in the hospital, between life and death. The police have a number of
 The Original Treatment 157

leads, the article states: some fingerprints, the jacket, although they had found
only several ten-thousand franc bills in it.
With the newspaper under his arm, Lucien enters the same travel agency he
had visited just before. Michel, the man he is looking for, has arrived. He hands
an envelope to Lucien. Everything seems to be settled. But Lucien is fuming. He
had been expecting cash but Michel has given him a check; worse yet, it is for
deposit only. Michel insists that he knows nothing about the deal, that he is only
making the transfer. He tells Lucien to see Berruti, who should be in Paris now,
because he’d seen him the day before yesterday. Berruti will surely get his check
cashed, perhaps even without a commission because a couple of years ago Lucien
saved his life.
Lucien is annoyed but he will have to go see him. He certainly doesn’t dare
present his check at the bank after the mishap with the cop. He uses Michel’s
telephone to call Berruti, who is not in. He is in Paris but the cleaning lady
doesn’t know where.
Lucien leaves the agency. As he goes out, he passes two men. The camera
stays with them. They are on their way to ask at the counter if anyone has seen
Lucien Poiccard, who has his mail sent there, having once worked for the agency.
Michel is forced to tell them that Lucien had come in five minutes before. The
detectives run out and look around them. No Lucien.
It doesn’t matter, one of them says, since they will have his photo and his
fingerprints that afternoon from the Interpol. The other says that perhaps Lucien,
having gotten away so quickly, has disappeared into the Metro.
They drop down into the Metro George V. We follow them. One goes to the
Vincennes [eastbound] platform, the other to the Neuilly [westbound]. We leave
them to focus again on Lucien, who climbs back out of the Metro exit onto the
Champs Elysées in front of the Normandy. He enters the cinema next door,
which advertises a Humphrey Bogart film. Lucien lingers in front of a photo of
Bogart.
Wednesday Evening. The light falls obliquely on the Boulevards. Lucien has
rejoined Patricia in a milk bar. They are going to eat in a snack shop. Because the
service is slow, they go elsewhere. Lucien wants to spend the whole night with
Patricia. She agrees. Suddenly she remembers that she has a call to make.
She returns from it. She kisses Lucien deliberately and very sweetly. ‘““Now we
go to bed,” says Lucien. But Patricia replies that it is not possible. She cannot
stay with him tonight. It is absolutely necessary that she see one of the editors at
the New York Herald who has promised to have some articles assigned to her.
158 Breathless

Tomorrow there is a novelist to interview and, as the woman who usually does
such interviews is not there, Patricia might be able to replace her. This is very
important to Patricia, and it is absolutely necessary that she see this editor.
Lucien asks her if she sleeps with him. Patricia says that it is none of his
business. She asks Lucien to escort her to the appointment she has made on the
telephone. If Lucien doesn’t want to, she will go by taxi. But Lucien says that he
will accompany her.
They get into a 403. Patricia asks Lucien if he has sold his big Ford. Lucien
says that it is in the garage. The garage has loaned him the 403 until his is ready.
Lucien leaves Patricia off in front of the Pergola café at the top of the Champs
Elysées. The camera stays with Patricia. She meets the journalist on the second
floor. They talk while she eats a dessert and he drinks a coffee. We learn that
Patricia is quite willing to sleep with him, partly out of friendship, but more
importantly for personal gain. She hopes to get to write articles for the ““Spec-
tacles” page he oversees. He tells her that there is a novelist to interview tomor-
row morning. He is giving a press conference at his hotel. Did Patricia want to
go in place of Clara, a girl at the newspaper? Patricia says yes. The journalist
asks if she will stay with him that night. Patricia agrees to this as well.
They walk down the Champs Elysées where the journalist’s car is parked.
Night has fallen. Patricia figures that Lucien has been watching them from the
bar where he was having a drink. He follows them at a distance.
The camera stays with Lucien who buys the latest edition of the France-Soir
while watching Patricia and the journalist get into an English car. The article in
the France-Soir says that the police are back on Lucien’s track, but that they don’t
know what name he is currently going under because he has several passports.
He has no record in France but there have been incidents in New York and Italy.
Still reading, Lucien has returned to his 403 and he follows the English car.
He pulls up next to them at a red light. He exchanges looks with Patricia,
which allows the camera to focus on her again. She seems sad. Then she makes a
small gesture of indifference.
Thursday Morning. The camera follows Patricia’s crossing the Pont du
Louvre as she returns home on foot. Her key is not behind the desk. She goes up
to her room. The key is in the door. Patricia enters and finds Lucien listening to
the radio, stretched out on her bed. He explains that all the hotels are full because
of the tourists.
She gets in bed next to him. They set up the day’s agenda. He will take her to
her press conference and then come to pick her up. In the meantime he will forge
 The Original Treatment 159

ahead with his own affairs which, we know, consist of following the progress of
the police investigation and getting in touch with Berruti as soon as possible in
order to get his check cashed. Because Patricia knows nothing about his identity,
with her Lucien always plays the role of a guy who has plenty of money and a
beautiful car.
They go to eat breakfast at an outdoor spot. While she eats, he says that he is
going to get his car at the garage and will be back in five minutes. Now he has
precisely this amount of time to find a car to steal. He locates one, a white
Thunderbird convertible. The driver gets out and enters an apartment building.
Lucien follows him, getting in the elevator with him without saying a word. He
watches him go into an office.
Immediately, Lucien dashes back down, hotwires the car, and takes off to pick
up Patricia at the sidewalk café.
While Patricia attends the press conference, Lucien goes to sell the Thunder-
bird in the suburbs. He has trouble with the used car dealer. The latter shows him
the latest France-Soir, which Lucien has neglected to buy: there is his photo with
the caption, “Traffic cop murderer still at large.” The used car dealer is quite
willing to buy the car but won’t give him the money for it for several days.
Lucien tries to filch some money from a drawer. A scuffle ensues between him
and the car dealer. Lucien clearly has the upper hand.
When he is gone, the car dealer calls the police and tells them that he has just
heard Lucien ask if a Patricia was there, at the New York Herald.
This explains why the detectives whom we have seen at the travel agency are
waiting for Patricia when she brings her article to the editorial department.
They show her the photo of Lucien. Patricia says that, in fact, she has gone out
with him two or three times but that she does not know where he is.
The detectives give her their telephone number. If she sees him again, she is to
inform them. “Okay,” says Patricia.
She leaves. Now she’s aware that one of the detectives is following her. She
goes into a movie theater, having seen Lucien following both her and the cop.
She comes out again from the back door; then she goes with Lucien into a cinema
on the other side of the Champs Elysées while the detective, completely con-
fused, emerges from the first theater.
Thursday Evening. When they leave the cinema after watching a western,
Patricia and Lucien look for a hotel where they can spend the night since Pa-
tricia’s room looks like it is being watched. But all the hotels are full, because of
the tourists.
160 Breathless

Lucien searches even more desperately for Berruti, to have him cash his
check. He runs into various people in various quarters (a girl at Strasbourg-Saint
Denis, a bar owner near the Opera and one at Saint Germain).
They are driving around in an obviously stolen car. Lucien tells Patricia that
now he has nothing to lose, so that even if it does mean trouble, they might as
well travel by car as on foot.
Just the same, in order to avoid unnecessary risks, he shows her the “garage
scam.” That is, he drives his car into a parking garage that only has a single,
aged attendant. He leaves it on the third level and takes another. He has Patricia,
whom he had told to hide when they drove in, take the wheel of this car. The old
man, seeing a pretty woman driving an impressive car, says nothing when they
leave.
Finally, Lucien does get in touch with Berruti who has been hanging around
Montparnasse; Berruti promises to help him. Perhaps as soon as tomorrow he
will be able to cash his check.
In the meantime, Lucien explains his problems to Berruti who gives him the
address of a model who is never home, saying Patricia and Lucien can spend the
night there.
The Next Morning, when Lucien is preparing to take off with the money that
Berruti brings him, Patricia announces that she has changed her mind. She has
Just reported him to the police who will be there in ten minutes.
Lucien is furious. But he must flee. He starts off in the car in which Berruti
has come looking for him. Out of the car door he hurls insults at Patricia.
The last shot shows Patricia watching Lucien leave and not understanding him
because her French is still not very good.
Interviews, Reviews,
and Commentaries
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 Interviews

[:the late fifties, interviewing film- most comprehensive, but because

makers was an important activity Godard is opening himself to his for-
for film critics. As a practicing mer collaborators at Cahiers du Ci-
journalist, Godard was himself a deft néma. The article he wrote about
and clever interviewer. As soon as he himself for Arts appeared in his usual
began filming Breathless he found column for that journal, a column for
himself on the other side of the en- which he frequently interviewed other
counter. At first he responded to these filmmakers. Here we find him very
sessions with verve and directness. aware of the fact that he is in effect
Later, his interviews would become interviewing himself. The result is
notorious games of hide and seek, of disarming.
ludicrous overstatement and calcu- A section of statements about
lated lie. Always interesting, his inter- Godard and his film made by associ-
views must be read symptomatically ates rounds out these interviews by
and indirectly, in the very manner one giving us a glimpse of things from
must learn to watch his films. both the inside and outside. Truffaut’s
Included here are excerpts from remarks are particularly endearing,
some of the first interviews. The 1962 especially in light of the rancor that
interview is of particular interest, not developed between the two directors
just because it is in its full version the later in the decade.
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Interview with Yvonne Baby
Godard: Breathless is my film but it’s not me. It is only a variation on a theme of
Truffaut who had the idea for the scenario. On this theme of Truffaut I told the
story of an American girl and a Frenchman. Things couldn’t go well between
them because he thinks about death all the time, while she never gives it a
thought. I told myself that if I didn’t add this idea to the scenario the film wouldn't
be interesting at all. The guy is obsessed with death, even has presentiments of it.
This is why I shot the scene of the accident where he sees a man die on the street.
I quoted the phrase of Lenin’s: ““We’re all dead men on leave,” and I chose the
Clarinet Concerto by Mozart since he wrote it just before he died.
Int.: How do you see the relationship of the couple in the film?
Godard: The American, Patricia, is on a psychological level, whereas the guy,
Michel, is on a poetic level. They use words—the same words—but they don’t
have the same meaning.
When she betrays her lover to the police, Patricia goes right to the end of
herself, and it is in this sense that I find her very moving. You don’t see in the film
the night preceding this betrayal. I prefer showing the moment when she acts. All
in all, from one work to another, for example from a film by [Robert] Bresson to
one by [Jean] Delannoy, characters resemble each other. But the difference—
and it’s fundamental—comes from the fact that the first shows only his characters
in interesting moments, whereas with the second it’s the opposite.
Int.: Does Belmondo play a character very near you?
Godard: | was inspired by a friend who traveled a lot and was always suspected
of smuggling. He also thought constantly about death. Socially I am quite distant
from the character of Belmondo. Morally he resembles me a lot. He’s a bit of an
anarchist.
Int.: What was your working method? Did you improvise?
Godard: I improvised nothing. I took a great many unorganized notes and then
wrote the scenes and the dialogue. Before beginning the film I sorted these notes
and came up with a general plan. This framework allowed me later to rework
every morning the eight pages corresponding to the sequence I was supposed to
shoot that afternoon. Except for certain scenes that were already thoroughly
worked out, I stuck with this working method and wrote my few minutes of film

From Le Monde, March 18, 1960. Translated by Dudley Andrew.

166 Interviews/Yvonne Baby

every day. The cameraman, Raoul Coutard, shot without artificial light in natural
settings, and with the camera on his shoulder. Shooting took four weeks. How do
I direct actors? I give lots of little instructions and I try to find just the essential
gestures. This film is really a documentary on Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul
Belmondo.
i’m Not Out of Breath
I’m afraid of all the furor around my film. I don’t want to discourage my admirers
who find it sublime and cry “genius,” but really they do exaggerate. While I can’t
say that I’m not satisfied with the result, it still feels very small next to The
Testament of Orpheus (Cocteau, 1960), or Pickpocket (Bresson, 1959), or Picnic
on the Grass (Renoir, 1959), or Two Men in Manhattan (Melville, 1960), or
Hiroshima (Resnais, 1959).
The danger for me would be that I might fall victim to my acolytes and
lose a sense of my means. You can’t promise a masterpiece without chancing
disappointment.
The great cinéastes always confine themselves within the rules of genre, the
rules of the game. I didn’t do this because I am only a little cinéaste. Look at the
films of Hawks, and particularly Rio Bravo. It’s a film of extraordinary subtlety
psychologically and aesthetically, but Hawks worked it out so that this subtlety
slides by imperceptibly, not shocking the spectator who came just to see a stan-
dard western. Hawks is all the stronger for having succeeded in integrating natu-
rally that which is important to him—his personal universe—into a banal sub-
ject. I prefer films like this because I would have the hardest time making them.
Since I couldn’t make this, I tell myself, “This is superior to what I do.”’ I believe
every real filmmaker ought to admire films of others while despising his own
because they bring him nothing new. No doubt this is why I have doubts about
Breathless, and | know I might be wrong. In sum, like all normal people, I love
that which isn’t like me at all and so I look to make films that don’t resemble me
CUNCE you.
For Breathless | had wanted first of all to respect the rules of the police genre,
like Hawks in The Big Sleep, because this was my first long film, a commercial
film made for a producer. I gave up on this, a bit out of laziness: to express
oneself through standard conventions demands very lengthy elaboration of the
rules and J don’t like to work. If I wanted to show consistent characters, they had
to act and talk like the people I know act and talk, including myself, and that one
can hardly do a priori. Hence, Breathless goes outside conventions.
But none of that is of any importance. You always do the opposite of what you
say, and everything comes out the same anyway. I am for classical montage and

From Arts, March 1960. Translated by Dudley Andrew.

168 Interviews/ Jean-Luc Godard

yet I’ve created the least orthodox style of montage. My next film, Le Petit
Soldat, will on the contrary fastidiously respect conventions. It will displease
those who admire Breathless and vice versa. The cinéaste, in contact with life,
discovers that theoretical oppositions between contraries fall apart and are base-
less. It is false to say that there exists the classic and the modern, or fascists and
progressives, or atheists and believers. There exist only those people concerned
with religion, with politics, and with literary problems, and those who aren’t
concerned at all. That’s all. Look at [Luis] Bufuel, [Roberto] Rossellini. Some
see in them the helpers of the Vatican, others, helpers of Satan. But they are both
at the same time.
By its subject and its expression, Breathless accentuates this confusion in a
relatively clear manner. ““Am I unhappy because I am free, or free because I’m
unhappy?” asks Jean Seberg. It’s at one and the same time a Catholic film be-
cause it shows us that human beings play with their lives, and every second, stage
their own executions in one way or another, and it’s a Marxist film, more Marxist
than The Salt of the Earth [Herbert Biberman, 1954] . . . because it shows the
state of moral decadence of young people in a capitalist country. Besides, Ca-
tholicism and Marxism, they’re the same thing; it’s just a matter of how you are
engaged in life. Breathless is a film about the necessity of engagement .. . I
wanted above all to make a film on death.
Interview with Films
and Filming
A standard technical way of telling stories was found by the American directors
before the war, and since then films have been made in the same way with no
imagination, and in France they were doing movies as if they were routine office
workers. It was not interesting. When Truffaut, Chabrol, and I were only writing
as critics we said just that, and as soon as we had money to do something we quit
articles and tried to do some shooting. We never considered ourselves as literary
critics but as future directors, and as such we would always comment on the
directing and cutting, whether it was good or bad. Although we had no practical
experience we learnt from watching films. . . .
. . . The success of the young directors in France is not because they make
films in a cheap and fast way, which is a good way to begin, but because of the
handling of their subjects.
The term /a nouvelle vague was the result of an enquiry by one of the big
French papers. It was an enquiry not about movies but about young people in
general, painters, financiers, and so forth, and they called them la nouvelle
vague. Then suddenly it became identified with new directors. But in France now
there is nouvelle vague in everything, even ping-pong. I think we are all waves.
With A bout de souffle I had a three-page manuscript written by Truffaut, and I
went to a producer and asked whether I could find some money on Truffaut’s
name, and he said yes. It was comparatively easy then because Truffaut had just
won a prize at Cannes. This producer was rather poor, he had no money coming
in and he had to do something, so he had nothing to lose. Truffaut’s was just an
idea for A bout de souffle, I changed everything and did the dialogue myself.
It was a fictional story, but I tried to make it in a documentary style. It was a
story about a killer, but with a flighty point of view. What I discovered when
making the film was that nothing is technically impossible unless you have tried
it. For instance, it is generally accepted that you can’t paint walls in white, you
have to paint them in yellow, well I wonder why? There are a thousand things like
this. In A bout de souffle 1 took out everything like this just to prove that it was
possible, although the result was sometimes exaggerating. The completed film
was two and a half hours in length, which was much too long, and I discovered
that when a discussion between two people became tedious and boring you may

From Films and Filming (September 1961).

170 Interviews/Films and Filming

as well cut between the dialogue. I tried it once and found it went fine, then I did
the same thing right through the film. But it was done in the style of the movie.
But in my next two films I never did such a thing.
My producer gave me freedom the major French producers would never allow
me, and I was able to do what I wanted. I consider Resnais’s Hiroshima and
Bresson’s Pickpocket as New Cinema whereas I consider my A bout de souffle as
being the end of the old Cinema, destroying all the old principles rather than
creating something new. It’s more like Picasso’s work, destroying everything
rather than creating in a new direction. . . .
Interview with Cahiers
du Cinéma

Int.: Jean-Luc Godard, you came to the cinema by way of film criticism. What
do you owe to this background?
Godard: All of us at Cahiers considered ourselves as future directors. Frequent-
ing film societies and the Cinémathéque, we were already thinking in strictly
cinematic terms. For us, it meant working at cinema, for between writing and
shooting there is a quantitative difference—not a qualitative one. The only critic
who was one completely was André Bazin. The others—[Georges] Sadoul,
[Bela] Balazs, or [Francesco] Pasinetti—are historians or sociologists, not
critics.
While I was a critic, I considered myself already a cinéaste. Today I still con-
sider myself a critic and, ina sense, Iam one more than before. Instead of writing a
critique I direct a film. I consider myself an essayist; I do essays in the form of
novels and novels in the form of essays: simply, I film them instead of writing
them. If the cinema were to disappear, I’d go back to pencil and paper. For me,
the continuity of all the different forms of expression is very important. It all
makes one block. The thing to know is how to approach this block from the site
most appropriate to you.
I think, too, that it’s very possible for a person to become a cinéaste without first
being a critic. It happened that, for us, it went as I said, but it’s not a rule. Rivette
and Rohmer made films in 16mm. But if criticism was the first echelon of a
vocation, it was not so much a means. It is said: they availed themselves of
criticism. No—we were thinking cinema and, at a certain moment, we felt the
need to deepen that thought.
Criticism taught us to love Rouch and Eisenstein at the same time. To criticism
we owe not excluding one aspect of the cinema in the name of another aspect of
the cinema. We owe it also the possibility of making films with more distance and
of knowing that if such and such a thing has already been done it is useless to do
it again. A young writer writing today knows that Moliére and Shakespeare exist.
We are the first cinéastes to know that Griffith exists. Even Carné, Delluc, or
René Clair, when they made their first films, had no true critical or historical
formation. Even Renoir had very little. (It is true that he had genius.)
From Cahiers du Cinéma, December 1962. Translated by Rose Kaplin in Jean-Luc Godard, ed. Toby
Mussman (New York: Dutton, 1968).
172 Interviews/Cahiers du Cinéma

Int.: This cultural basis exists only in a fraction of the New Wave.
Godard: Yes, in those from Cahiers, but for me that fraction is the whole thing.
There is the group from Cahiers (and also Astruc, Kast—and Leenhart, who are
somewhat apart) to which must be added what we might call the Left Bank
Group: Resnais, Colpi, Varda, Marker. Also Demy. These had their own cultural
basis, but there are not thirty-six others. Cahiers was the nucleus.
They say that now we can no longer write about our colleagues. Obviously, it
has become difficult to have coffee with someone if, that afternoon, you have to
write that he’s made an idiotic film, but what has always differentiated us from
others is that we take a stand for a criticism of praise: we speak of a film, if we
like it. If we don’t like it, we exempt ourselves from breaking its back. All one
has to do is hold to this principle.
Int.: Your critical attitude seems to contradict the idea of improvisation which is
attached to your name.
Godard: | improvise, without doubt, but with material that dates from way back.
One gathers, over the years, piles of things and then suddenly puts them in what
one is doing. My first shorts had a lot of preparation and were shot very quickly.
Breathless was started in this way. I had written the first scene (Jean Seberg on
the Champs Elysées) and, for the rest, I had an enormous amount of notes corre-
sponding to each scene. I said to myself, this is very distracting. I stopped every-
thing. Then I reflected: in one day, if one knows what one is doing, one should be
able to shoot a dozen sequences. Only, instead of having the material for a long
time, I'll get it just before. When one knows where he is going, this must be
possible. This is not improvisation, it’s decision-making at the last minute. Ob-
viously, you have to have and maintain a view of the ensemble; you can modify a
certain part of it, but after the shooting starts keep the changes to a minimum—
otherwise it’s catastrophic.
I read in Sight and Sound that I was improvising in the Actors’ Studio style,
with actors to whom one says: you are such and such, take it from there. But Bel-
mondo’s dialogue was never invented by him. It was written: only, the actors
didn’t learn it—the film was shot silent and I whispered the cues.
Int.: When you started the film, what did it represent for you?
Godard: Our first films were purely films by cinéphiles. One may avail oneself of
something already seen in the cinema in order to make deliberate references.
This was the case for me. Actually, I was reasoning according to purely cine-
matographic attitudes. I worked out certain images, schemes with relation to
 Interviews/Cahiers du Cinéma 173

others I knew from Preminger, Cukor, etc. . . . In any case Jean Seberg was a
continuation of the role she played in Bonjour Tristesse. 1 could have taken the
last frame of that and linked it with a title: “three years later.” . . . This is to
reconcile my taste for quotation, which I have always kept. Why reproach us for
it? People in life quote as they please, so we have the right to quote as we please.
Therefore I show people quoting, merely making sure that they quote what
pleases me. In the notes I make of anything that might be of use for a film, I will
add a quote from Dostoievsky if I like it. Why not? If you want to say something,
there is only one solution: say it.
Moreover, the genre of Breathless was such that all was permitted, that was its
nature. Whatever people might do—all this could be integrated into the film.
This was even my point of departure. I said to myself: there has already been
Bresson, we just had Hiroshima, a certain kind of cinema has just ended—well,
then, let’s put the final period to it: let’s show that anything goes. What I wanted
to do was to depart from the conventional story and remake, but differently,
everything that had already been done in the cinema. I also wanted to give the
impression of just finding or experiencing the processes of cinema for the first
time. The iris shot showed that it was permissible to return to the sources of
cinema and the linking shot came along, by itself, as if one had just invented it. If
there weren’t other processes, this was in reaction to a certain cinema, but this
doesn’t have to be a rule. There are films where they are necessary: from time to
time one could do more with them.
What is hardest on me is the ending. Is the hero going to die? At first, I was
thinking of doing the opposite of, for example, The Killing. The gangster would
succeed and leave for Italy with his money. But this would have been a very
conventional anti-convention, like having Nana succeed in My Life to Live. |
finally told myself that since, after all, all my avowed ambitions were to make a
normal gangster film I couldn’t systematically contradict the genre: the guy had to
die. If the descendants of Atreus don’t massacre each other any more, they are no
longer descendants of Atreus.
But improvisation is fatiguing. I am always telling myself: this is the last time!
It’s not possible anymore! It’s too fatiguing to go to sleep every night asking
oneself, “What am I going to do tomorrow morning?” It’s like writing an article
at twenty-to-twelve at a café table when it has to be delivered to the paper at
noon. What is curious is that one always arrives at writing it, but working like
this month after month is killing. At the same time there is a certain amount of
174 Interviews/Cahiers HusCindme

premeditation. You say to yourself that if you are honest and sincere and in a
corner and have to do something, the result will necessarily be honest and
sincere.
Only, you never do exactly what you believe you’re doing. Sometimes you even
arrive at the exact opposite. This is true for me, in any case, but at the same time
I lay claim to everything I’ve done. I realized, at a certain point, that Breathless
was not at all what I believed it to be. I believed I’d made a realistic film and it
wasn’t that at all. First of all, I didn’t possess sufficient technical skill, then I
discovered that I wasn’t made for this genre of film. There are also a great number
of things I’d like to do and don’t do. For example, I’d like to be like Fritz Lang
and have frames which are extraordinary in themselves, but I don’t arrive at that.
So I do something else. I like Breathless enormously—for a certain period I was
ashamed of it, but now I place it where it belongs: with Alice in Wonderland. I
thought it was Scarface.
Breathless is a story, not a subject. A subject is something simple and vast
about which one can make a resumé in twenty seconds: revenge, pleasure. . . a
story takes twenty minutes to recapitulate. The Little Soldier has a subject: a
young man is confused, realizes it and tries to find clarity. In A Woman Is
a Woman a girl wants a baby at any cost and right away. In Breathless, | was
looking for a subject all during the shooting; finally I became interested in Bel-
mondo. I saw him as a sort of a fagade which it was necessary to film in order to
know what was behind it. Seberg, on the contrary, was an actress whom I wanted
to make do many little things that pleased me—this came from the cinéphile side
I no longer have. . . .
Statements
Georges de Beauregard, Producer

Jean-Luc Godard is my friend. We have known each other for a very long time.
Together we lived through a difficult period: there is no better way to learn to
appreciate someone.
I met him at a time when French cinema was suffocated by conformity. Films
were made according to a fixed routine. Godard had ideas. He wanted to break
with this standardization, create a modern cinema, in tune with our time. I pro-
vided him with the means to do what he wanted to do. He has revealed himself to
be the surest talent of our generation. He is very close to the public, he has a feel
for the public, even if certain of his films have failed to meet with commercial
success. Today, he has profited from all his experiences. His style is that of a man
who has assimilated a great deal. He is in complete control of his medium.
As a human being, I appreciate him a great deal, and I like what he does. It is
my principle, by the way, never to separate work and friendship. I try to make
films with people who might also become my friends. To produce a film, for me,
comes down to a sort of moral compact. My task is to discover young people in
whom I can place this confidence. We must know each other over a period of
several months before working on a film.
I appreciate in Jean-Luc Godard his absolute honesty, in his work as well as in
his personal relations.
He has very personal methods of filmmaking. We prepare the film together
through free and amicable discussion. After that, he organizes everything as he
sees fit: he shoots on certain days and on others, he stops, reflects. Sometimes he
overshoots a deadline, but never a budget. Lately, as a matter of fact, he has
adopted a comfortable rhythm. He shot Contempt very rapidly. One senses that
he is very sure of himself.

Raoul Coutard, Cameraman

The first time I saw J.-L. Godard he was working on the scenario for Pécheur
d’islande: hirsute, smoking a pipe, entrenched behind his dark glasses, silent.
Originally published in 1963, translated by Ciba Vaughan in Jean-Luc Godard, an Investigation into
His Films and Philosophy by Jean Collet (New York: Crown, 1970).
176 Statements/ Raoul Coutard

Second contact, preparation of Breathless: he was more talkative.

From day to day, as the details of his screenplay became more precise, he
explained his conception: no foot for the camera, no light if possible, traveling
shots without rails. . . . Little by little we discovered a need to escape from
convention and even to run completely counter to the rules of “cinematographic
grammar.”
During the shooting he dug even more firmly into his position; the shooting
plan was devised as we went along, as was the dialogue.
The film took shape from moment to moment, as he viewed the screenings.
Having come to a basic idea of the characters, he relied on the actors for all the
details.
Godard maintains this freedom with the script even in those films, like Les
Carabiniers or Contempt, that have a written screenplay.
Similarly, he could never say the evening before, or even a moment before,
what would be done next—the decision would be made during the rehearsal of a
scene and sometimes, after having shot a sequence, the entire scene would be
reconstructed from a different angle.
Godard takes time out to reflect, chewing his thumb and forefinger.
He is never very talkative, and in order to find out what to do, it is more useful
to establish a basic communication than to ask questions. Even then it is very
difficult to imagine what might, in his eyes, be important; sometimes we had to
start a scene over four and five times because of certain details that were not
apparent to the rest of us.
The freedom he achieves with the absence of a prepared script permits an
enormous flexibility in shooting, and it often happens that, if he doesn’t have a
scene completely worked out in his head, he decides to shoot something entirely
different, in an altogether different setting, at the last minute. Occasionally he
stops for a day to catch his breath and to think. . . .
But during the entire shooting, he is preoccupied by the schedule and budget.
Although money is of no importance whatsoever for him personally, it matters
for the production, and he modifies his directing as the need arises in order to
economize in one scene what he may have overspent on other sequences.
What points of reference might help one to understand him?
His humanity, which glows through in the unreserved support he gives to his
friends and in the sincere need he feels to give pleasure to those who surround
him and work with him. And though he will occasionally leap down someone’s
throat, he keeps apologizing until he is sure that the pain he has caused has been
 Statements/Francois Truffaut 177

erased. He, too, has need of friendship, and he couldn’t conceive of making a
film with a producer who wasn’t also a potential friend.
His good faith in everything that he does, which is manifest, for example, in
the fact that he readily admits his errors, to the point that sometimes he will bear
the blame for his collaborators’ mistakes.
Truth is a necessity for him. For example, his need for truth is such that he will
not fake an exterior, he will refuse to light a room if shooting is possible without
it, and he uses direct sound under any and all conditions.

Francois Truffaut

. . . Of all Jean-Luc’s films, it is Breathless that I prefer. It is the saddest. It is a

heart-rending film. In it there is deep unhappiness and even, as Aragon says,
“deep, deep, deep” unhappiness.
Breathless won the Prix Vigo.
In effect, Breathless is an heir to L’Atalante. Vigo’s film ends with Jean Dasté
and Dita Parlo locked in an embrace on the bed. That evening they surely con-
ceived a child, and that child is the Belmondo of Breathless.
The miracle of Breathless is that it was made at a time in the life of a man in
which normally he would not make a film. One doesn’t make a film when one is
sad and destitute. Making a film means that you’re living in a hotel or an apart-
ment, that you are disengaged from material worries, and that you make your
film without any distraction from your present thoughts.
In the case of Breathless, the man who made it was almost a pauper. Therein
lies the miracle. It is rare that being so unhappy and so alone, one can still make
a film.
In this connection, Jean-Luc said a rather cruel thing to me, during the shoot-
ing of the film: “I don’t feel comfortable in this story of a killer. I was wrong to
ask you for your scenario. I should have written one myself and then asked you to
sign it. . . .” I would have done it, too, of course. But I believe that the scenario,
such as it was, did help him. Jean-Luc’s career has demonstrated that he is suc-
cessful each time he deals with a situation like the one in Breathless. With Vivre
sa vie, there is a girl. She is in a fixed situation, desperate straits, and from the
beginning and at the end of the road lies death. Between these two poles, he can
do what he pleases, the train rolls along without a hitch.
Personally, I divide his six films into two categories: two sets of three films
178 Statements/Francois Truffaut

each. The group I prefer consists of Breathless, Vivre sa vie, and Contempt.
Their point in common is that they take off from a principal character whom they
follow as if the film were a documentary. These are his three sad films. They are
the most rigorously constructed. The part played by autobiography in each is
greater than the role of invention.
Let’s say, for the sake of simplicity, that in Le Petit Soldat, A Woman Is a
Woman, and Les Carabiniers, Godard was focusing on his thoughts. In Breath-
less, Vivre sa vie, and Contempt, he was filming his feelings.
 Reviews

reathless was immediately the cinéphiles. Nevertheless, it is fasci-

B= of a barrage of critical re- nating to note the rather poetic tone
sponse, the intensity of which of these standard reviews and the phil-
has seldom been matched in the his- osophical and stylistic descriptions
tory of cinema. From the scores of they attempt. All of the French reviews
published opinions and expressions, I were translated by Dory O’Brien and
have chosen to sample some rather myself.
standard French responses and a num- In going through the English-
ber of the more articulate English- language press, I was discouraged by
language reviews. the generally dull quality of the writ-
The French material should illus- ing and the often pedestrian concerns
trate the way the film was taken by of the reviewers. I have picked out
the critical establishment. Except for those reviews that seemed most wor-
Marcabru’s piece, these reviews all ap- thy and diverse without regard to
peared in papers and magazines with source or to the fame or notoriety of
very large circulations aimed at the the reviewer. Nevertheless, a good
average citizen. I have not included many of these reviews were penned
the inflated meditations on the film by by notable figures in film journalism.
Godard’s friends nor the attacks on the The reader is urged to ferret out
film by his open enemies—at Positif more reviews by consulting Jean-Luc
and elsewhere. In other words, I have Godard: A Guide to References and
stayed away from the discourse of the Resources, prepared by Julia Lesage.
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Le Monde
Jean de Baroncelli

Te Breathless should come to the movie screens of Paris a few days after
Purple Noon [René Clément, 1959] is clearly only a coincidence. But this
coincidence is too striking not to tempt one to compare the two films, that of
the veteran and that of the newcomer, especially since the subjects they treat
offer a certain similarity. Purple Noon is the work of a man who has achieved
mastery over his art; a work of exceptional intelligence, rigor, and plasticity. Yet
the very classicism and (over)refinement of the film seem to me to fit imperfectly
with its subject. Breathless is, on the other hand, the work of a newcomer who,
by taste as much as by necessity (having been given precarious means to work
with), has turned up his nose at the rules of film narrative. Over against these
rules he has preferred his instinct. This was the right move, for as a result he has
found the exactly appropriate tone for the romantic chaos of his story. Speaking
the other day of Purple Noon, | regretted not having felt, despite my admiration
for the work of Clément, that small artistic spark that provokes enthusiasm.
Whereas the frequently flawed film of Godard has made this small spark con-
stantly flicker for me. My preferences are clear enough.
Another thing. Breathless arrives in time to regild the emblem of the New
Wave, which we all know doesn’t exist but which these last months everyone has
consented to subject to obloquy. The absurdity of generalizations. Because three
or four films in succession have let one detect the excessive influence of the most
brilliant of our authors (‘‘in the beginning was Sagan’), we rush to condemn, “‘en
bloc,”’ a movement of renewal which has just begun to bear fruit. By replacing, in
his film, the play of wit with the movement of the heart (even if this movement is
at first disconcerting), by mixing tenderness with violence, sensitivity with
cynicism, and the freshness of emotions with the cruelty of words and actions,
Jean-Luc Godard has delivered a masterstroke of extraordinary power. And by
means of the same strategy he has traced an exact portrait of a certain modern
romanticism.
Another sordid tale of debauchery, they will claim. Yes, certainly. But the real-

From Le Monde, March 18, 1960.

182 Reviews/Jean de Baroncelli

ism here is not artificial, nor the sordidness gratuitous. The hero of Breathless is
not a criminal automaton. He is a lost kid in whom we can detect a heart and a
soul—enough human depth to make us feel intimate with and even sympathetic
to him. His madness, his brutality, his cynicism, his sudden outbursts of tender-
ness and hope, that need for “something else’’: so many exacerbated signs of the
old malady of youth, of an eternal romanticism. . . .
I have already alluded to the technique of Jean-Luc Godard: Breathless was
entirely shot—exteriors and interiors—in natural settings. As did Rossellini in
the time of Open City, Godard hid his camera in the crowd and blended his actors
with passersby. The result is that, if the photography is not as slick as the afi-
cionados of pretty pictures would wish it, a prodigious impression of truth
emerges from the film. One literally follows the traces of the protagonists. One
loses oneself in their existence. It goes without saying that they do not cease to be
fictional.
I know I’ve been only praising the film. There are clearly reservations to
articulate. Breathless is far from being an absolute masterpiece. But it is almost
as good: it is a film that gives us confidence in a young director. . . . Let us
emphasize the fact that the scenario carries the signature of Francois Truffaut,
and that Claude Chabrol supervised the production. But there is no point in
fooling ourselves: this film carries the mark of an auteur. And this auteur is
Jean-Luc Godard.
Arts
Pierre Marcabru

ean-Luc Godard has understood that the outside world comes to us in suc-
cessive jumps, that the eye and the ear never cling to continuity in the act of
seeing or hearing. On the contrary, the succession of visual perspectives and
of sounds is an up-and-down process, thus demanding irregular attention from
the camera, a sequence of seemingly disorderly glances. This makes for a cinema
of tension, that is, of impulses of the gaze added one on top of the other, of
constitutive characteristics essential to the significance of a given situation.
Hence a sort of phenomenological observation of the characters, which makes
Breathless the most important movie we have seen since Hiroshima, mon amour.
Now if I wanted to overwhelm Godard, I would say that in its morality his
work is Nietzschean and in its mode of observation, it is Husserlian. But let us be
serious. Quite simply it seems to me that his work provides a fresh start to a
behavioral cinema. It is this that is most important.

From Arts, March 19, 1960.

Le Figaro Littéraire
Claude Mauriac

ean-Luc Godard quotes Griffith. He makes use of a time-honored method of

punctuation, the iris, to which he returns the freshness and value it once
possessed. A recourse, one among many, to an art of which he knows all the
possibilities. But let’s listen to his profession of faith: ““With Hiroshima and with
Pickpocket something begins which is essentially new, as with Klee in painting.”
Hiroshima, mon amour was, until Breathless, unquestionably the only recent
film to offer a new future to the art of the screen. One of the major interests of
this work was that Marguerite Duras had as much to do with this, even in the
opinion of Resnais, as the director himself. What’s truly important is this collab-
oration of “‘authors’”” who make use of the cinema in order to write the work of
their choice. Whether one approves or not of the style is another question. Liter-
ary criticism is possible because there are texts. Perhaps before Hiroshima criti-
cism had very little to do with films. A work as ambitious as this one, a creation
this free, is too new to the screen for the question of whether or not we approve of
the form to come up in our reviews.
In citing Pickpocket, Godard likewise situates his work in its true context. His
reference to Klee is, as well, most illuminating. In painterly terms, Bresson
would be abstract, while Godard representational. False dichotomy: in painting
as in cinema reality is always both the point of departure and the terminus of a
work. The artist reconstructs what he sees in order to portray it in terms of what
appears to him to be the essential truth of reality. Forms are first deformed before
they are reformed: we may or may not recognize the object, but it is always there.
We are speaking of the only art that matters: that without gratuity.
In search of their most secret and true voices, the Bresson of Pickpocket makes
his characters speak with apparent artificiality. The tone is that which unmedi-
ated consciousness would have if it were possible to record the murmur of its
meanderings. Jean-Luc Godard proceeds in the opposite manner to achieve the
same result: one of the innovations of Breathless resides in the natural quality of
the dialogue. It seems to us that for the first time we were hearing real speech on

From Le Figaro Littéraire, March 19, 1960.

 Reviews/Claude Mauriac 185

the screen. But this naturalness was only apparent. It had been entirely re-
created.
The writing of the film exhibits a surprising liberty. Syncopated rhythm,
broken, then taken up again, but continuing in a prescribed cadence, with never a
dead space, even when the filmmaker consciously transgresses the rules. His
hero is, like each of us, obsessed by certain ideas and certain words, always the
same ones. It is in repeating himself that he expresses in the only way he can that
which is inexpressible in him.
The deftness of Godard is visible in his having chosen the most classic and the
most commercial of themes: a criminal in flight. Good strategy. I have never
understood those directors who would refuse to make thrillers because they pre-
ferred not to compromise their noble ambitions. With any theme, in films as in
novels, one can say everything. It is with joy that we salute the coming of age of a
new cinéaste who brings us the happiness of a rich, violent, poetic work that in
no way resembles any film ever made before.
Le Figaro
Louis Chauvet

et us go, for a bit, “against the current.” In such an endeavor we will do

nothing other than observe the sacrosanct principles of the new school. Little
has been said until now about the flaws of this first film by Jean-Luc Go-
dard. Let’s consider them. We will then be better able to praise the film. After all,
haven't the persons concerned clearly proclaimed their phobia of perfection?
[One.] All young film writers assume the affectation of despising their subject.
So be it.
If the characters exist after their own fashion, sometimes delirious, sometimes
stupid, even in a nonexistent story, this is quite acceptable. But why is it that we
always find, in New Wave society, the same types of characters, the likeable
hoodlums (this ‘likeable hoodlum” is becoming, it would seem, a “‘modern
hero”’), the neurotics, the decadent young bourgeois, unbalanced and unsatis-
fied, who give themselves up to apparently desperate erotic adventures, living by
the same philosophy and forever delivering almost the same lines? Is this not a
summary view of the contemporary world, of the new humanity?
Two. The method; it’s no longer very original. In 1948, Sydney Myers
produced, with equal technical “Jansenism,”' The Quiet One, in the streets of
Harlem—an unforgettable film that was not well received. Unlucky Quiet One!
It came out twelve years too early!
Three. Contempt for conventional rules—montage, continuity—that tries to
justify itself. The deception would be to present as a personal style an “I don’t
give a damn” style. [D. W.] Griffith would say that to make the contrary succeed
is more difficult, and Euripides and Bernanos,” with whom Godard is compared,
would not deny this.
Four. The movement of the camera. Does the camera move? Bravo! This must
From Le Figaro, March 18, 1960.
1. Jansenism was a seventeenth-century Roman Catholic religious movement characterized by ex-
cessive austerity, eventually condemned by the Church as heresy.—Ed.
2. Georges Bernanos was a polemical Catholic novelist best known for Diary of a Country Priest.
He died in 1948.—Ed.
 Reviews/Louis Chauvet 187

be the golden rule: when the camera lurches, so does the spectator; he becomes
seasick.
It was necessary, I believe, to point out all of this so that we can accurately
determine the qualities of the author’s flaws. And then go on to positive qualities.
Godard endeavors to create a language through an alliance of humorous or
seductive images and dialogue (sometimes transformed into simultaneous mono-
logues with an undeniable realistic lilt). This constitutes the film’s true novelty.
The limits of the endeavor appear when what is said reminds one too much of
the nasal tones of a tape recording reproducing the conversation of some wild
kids bent on saying anything that comes to mind.
But these utterances, energetically zany, purposely crude, vulgar (pathetic,
nonetheless, to the degree that their futile strategy hides some profound an-
guish), creates a sort of charm, a secondary poetry out of flashes of wit and
paradoxes, which cannot be ignored.
The scenes recorded, whether in the street, on the Champs Elysées, in the
middle of an apparently inattentive crowd or in the intimacy of a room, prove
that Jean-Luc Godard is not only an inspired documentarist, but also an analyst
who is intrigued by the states of the soul and their unceasing effects on facial
expression. He scrutinizes these faces with a powerful exactitude.
There. I think one must exaggerate nothing—and underestimate nothing.
That Jean-Luc Godard has talent, ability, a sense of humor, a sarcastic wit (to
which the spirit of provocation doesn’t add much), a belief in cinematography, an
active desire ‘‘to open new avenues,” revealed in his first film. . . this is already
a great deal.
The film seems assured of commercial success (certainly . . . certainly). The
author will adjust to this, I suppose.
Let us not close without noting how much the beautiful, touching, and, this
time, very astonishing Jean Seberg contributes to the charm of the feminine
lyricism that accompanies the narrative; as well as how effective is the presence
of Jean-Paul Belmondo.
Variety
Gene Moskowitz

T his film emerges as a summation of the so-called ‘new wave” trends here in
that it is a first pic by a film critic, it shows the immediate influence of Yank
actioners and socio-psycho thrillers. Also the film has no big French names,
but has the Yank name of Jean Seberg and has its own personal style.
All of this adds up to a production resembling such past Yank pix as “Gun
Crazy,” “They Live By Night” and “Rebel Without a Cause.” But it has local
touches in its candor, lurid lingo, frank love scenes, and general tale of a young,
childish hoodlum whose love for a boyish looking, semi-intellectual American
girl is his undoing. Gal, incidentally, sells papers in the street.
Pic uses a peremptory cutting style that looks like a series of jump cuts. Char-
acters suddenly shift around rooms, have different bits of clothing on within two
shots, etc. But all this seems acceptable, for this unorthodox film moves quickly
and ruthlessly.
The young, mythomaniacal crook is forever stealing autos, but the slaying of a
cop puts the law on his trail. The girl finally gives him up because she feels she
does not really love him, and also she wants her independence. Film does not
engender much feeling over the ironic death of the petty thug in the street, but
none of the characters rarely feel anything.
There are too many epigrams and a bit too much palaver in all this. However,
this does give a new view of a certain type of fed-up, stagnating French youth. It
is picaresque and has enough insight to keep it from being an out-and-out melo-
dramatic quickie. With the Jean Seberg name, plus the action, this could be a
playoff possibility even worth dubbing.
But it looms more of an arty house bet. A “wave” film, with its grabbag
mixture of content, satire, drama, and protest, this will need the hard sell. Tech-
nique is okay but somewhat grimy because of the spot shooting. But this very
grayness may be rated an asset. Miss Seberg lacks emotive projection but it helps
in her role of a dreamy little Yank abroad playing at life. Her boyish prettiness is
real help. Jean-Paul Belmondo is excellent as the cocky hoodlum. Though the
revolt may be a little hazy, this is a fairly vital off-beater worth special handling.

From Variety, January 27, 1960.

Sight and Sound
Louis Marcorelles

Jesse Godard, who was born of Swiss descent 29 years ago but who is
Parisian by adoption, made his first feature film, A bout de souffle, on a
modest budget of some £30,000. He was lucky enough to be able to work
without any external restraint, in spite of the fact that his star was the fairly
important young American actress Jean Seberg, borrowed from Columbia Pic-
tures to whom she is under contract. The male lead, Jean-Paul Belmondo, ap-
peared in Claude Chabrol’s A Double Tour and had earlier played in an extraordi-
nary short feature, Charlotte et son Jules, also made by Godard. The credits of A
bout de souffle list Francois Truffaut as screenwriter and Claude Chabrol as “‘ar-
tistic supervisor’’; but this was done for the benefit of the technicians’ union and,
in fact, Chabrol had little more to do with the film than to lend it his name, while
Truffaut’s contribution was the discovery of a news snippet which became the
starting point of the plot. A bout de souffle is therefore a genuine film d’ auteur—
more so than either Les Quatre Cents Coups or Hiroshima, mon amour, to which
the screenwriters made powerful contributions. Godard is a lone wolf; he ex-
presses himself with the absolute independence of a novelist, yet with a disci-
pline and style, in the literary sense, which make his film perhaps the most
perfectly realised screen novel produced to date.
Many spectators, especially English ones, may not take his film very seriously
when they see how much it owes to American techniques, to comedies and gang-
ster movies. (The film is wryly dedicated to Monogram Pictures!) The serious
filmgoer in London or Oxford, New York or Boston, may well be shocked by the
ingrained vulgarity of the theme and by the characters Godard has chosen to
portray... .
The film is wildly cruel and pitilessly anarchic. The social order is violently
repudiated; love is impossible; death is imminent . . . the film takes on a tragic
coloration, but this is achieved without embroidery or affectation. Godard, who
admires the work both of Nicholas Ray and of Mizoguchi, rejects traditional
techniques, sets out to be provocative, plays continually on shock effects. He
uses a form of montage which could be irritating if overworked, but which is

From Sight and Sound 29 (Spring 1960), 84—85.

190 Reviews/Louis Marcorelles

here held under strict control and achieves miracles: Patricia is talking to Michel;
the camera never leaves her face, but by cutting and closing up this single se-
quence, Godard takes the viewer into a breathless, tumbling daze of a scene.
At the end, Michel is on the ground, dying in front of the policeman who has
shot him down. Patricia rushes up to him, and his last words are: “Tu es dé-
gueulasse.”’ The final shot is a close-up of Jean Seberg frenziedly asking the
policeman: “Qu’est-ce que c’ est que dégueulasse?”
Vulgar language which may well raise a few pious eyebrows; but it is exactly
in keeping with the situation, and this is made many times more effective by the
scrupulous care given to photography, acting and direction. We are in the world
of the unreal, outside literature, outside sermonizing: in a world of total immo-
rality, lived skin-deep. This is the opposite pole, obviously, from the Brechtian
concept of committed art; and Godard is himself explicit about this. “For the
artist, to know himself too well is to give way, to some extent, to facility. The
difficult thing is to advance into unknown territory, to be aware of the danger, to
take risks, to be afraid. . . . The cinema is not a trade. It isn’t team-work. One is
always alone while shooting, as though facing a blank page.”
Like Les Quatre Cents Coups, A bout de souffle was filmed entirely in Paris, a
modern, largely Americanized Paris. One can challenge the irresponsibility of
this kind of cinema, but not the talent of a young artist whose revelations are so
startling that they demand attention. The dialogue is dense and highly literary,
but it does not aim at effects for effects’ sake; and it indicates that Godard, who
in his articles as a critic writes a language worthy of Giraudoux, is up to the
standard of the uncommitted “Jeune Droite”’ novelists, writers such as Antoine
Blondin, a recent prize-winner for his excellent Un Singe en hiver. Instead of
writing a novel, Godard writes a film. . . .
The New York Times
Bosley Crowther

A sordid as is the French film, Breathless (A bout de souffle), which came to

the Fine Arts yesterday—and sordid is really a mild word for its pile-up of
gross indecencies—it is withal a fascinating communication of the savage
ways and moods of some of the rootless young people of Europe (and America)
today.
Made by Jean-Luc Godard, one of the newest and youngest of the “new wave”
of experimental directors who seem to have taken over the cinema in France, it
goes at its unattractive subject in an eccentric photographic style that sharply
conveys the nervous tempo and the emotional erraticalness of the story it tells.
And through the American actress, Jean Seberg, and a hypnotically ugly new
young man by the name of Jean-Paul Belmondo, it projects two downright fear-
some characters.
This should be enough, right now, to warn you that this is not a movie for the
kids or for that easily shockable individual who used to be known as the old lady
from Dubuque. It is emphatically, unrestrainedly vicious, completely devoid of
moral tone, concerned mainly with eroticism and the restless drives of a cruel
young punk to get along. Although it does not appear intended deliberately to
shock, the very vigor of its reportorial candor compels that it must do so.
On the surface, it is a story of a couple of murky days in the lives of two erratic
young lovers in Paris, their temporary home. He is a car thief and hoodlum, on
the lam after having casually killed a policeman while trying to get away with a
stolen car. She is an expatriate American newspaper street vender and does occa-
sional stories for an American newspaper man friend.
But in the frenetic fashion in which M. Godard pictures these few days—the
nerve-tattering contacts of the lovers, their ragged relations with the rest of the
world—there is subtly conveyed a vastly complex comprehension of an element
of youth that is vagrant, disjointed, animalistic and doesn’t give a damn for any-
body or anything, not even itself.
The key is in the character that M. Belmondo plays, an impudent, arrogant,

From the New York Times, February 8, 1961.

192 Reviews/Bosley Crowther

sharp-witted and alarmingly amoral hood. He thinks nothing more of killing a

policeman or dismissing the pregnant condition of his girl than he does of pilfer-
ing the purse of an occasional sweetheart or rabbit-punching and robbing a guy in
a gentlemen’s room.
For a brief spell—or, rather a long spell, for the amount of time it takes up in
the film—as he casually and coyly induces his pensive girlfriend to resume their
love affair, it does look as if there may be a trace of poignant gentleness in him,
some sincerity beneath the imitation of a swaggering American movie star. But
there isn’t. When his distracted girl finally turns him in and he is shot in the
street, he can only muster a bit of bravado and label his girl with a filthy name.
The girl, too, is pretty much impervious to morality or sentiment, although
she does indicate a sensitive nature that has been torn by disappointments and
loneliness. As little Miss Seberg plays her, with her child’s face and closely
cropped hair, she is occasionally touching. But she is more often cold and
shrewd, an efficiently self-defensive animal in a glittering, glib, irrational, heart-
less world.
All of this, and its sickening implications, M. Godard has got into this film,
which progresses in a style of disconnected cutting that might be described as
“pictorial cacophony.’’ A musical score of erratic tonal qualities emphasizes the
eccentric moods. And in M. Belmondo we see an actor who is the most effective
cigarette-mouther and thumb-to-lip rubber since time began.
Say this, in sum, for Breathless: it is certainly no cliché, in any area or sense
of the word. It is more a chunk of raw drama, graphically and artfully torn with
appropriately ragged edges out of the tough underbelly of modern metropoli-
tan life.
The New Republic
Stanley Kauffmann

|:addition to her function as aesthetic conscience of the Western world,

France has always been a pioneer in moral matters. I don’t mean things like the
so-called “‘French farce,’’ which has as little relevance to French life as to
”

anyone’s; I mean, for instance, the fact that Madame Bovary was published in the
same year [1858] as Little Dorrit and three years before The Marble Faun. The
French continue to explore in both areas. Much of the result can be written off as
mere excursion, like dadaism and the anti-novel, still they do it.
The penalty of this virtue is high expectation, which is why the much-discussed
New Wave of French films has been disappointing. Although several good films
emerged from it, it has been more a Young Wave than a new one. But now, with
the appearance of Breathless, we have a film that is new, aesthetically and
morally.
The director—whose film this is in a way that no American film belongs to its
director—is Jean-Luc Godard, who is 30 and who wrote the screenplay from an
idea suggested by Francois Truffaut, of The 400 Blows. This is Godard’s first
full-length film, and it quickly establishes that he has a style of his own and a
point of view. He tells here the story of a restless, dissatisfied young man, and his
camera follows the protagonist about like a puppy, wheeling and reversing and
crowding up close; switching abruptly (without dissolves) as abruptly as the
young man himself loses interest in one matter and goes on to the next. Form and
subject are perfectly matched in this work.
That subject is the anti-hero—not to be described by the favorite cavil word
‘“‘amoral”’ but immoral and living in an immoral world. He may have got there
because of his revulsion or our exclusion of him, but that is where he now lives
by upside-down standards. Already familiar to us through numerous works from
Jarry through Céline to Camus, he now appears on the screen: stealing, mugging,
murdering—and engaging us. We do not bleed for him as the child of uncon-
genial parents or as an underprivileged waif. He is not to be cured by any of the
cozy comforts of psychoanalysis or social meliorism. The trouble with this

From The New Republic, February 13, 1961.

194 Reviews/Stanley Kauffmann

young man, although he doesn’t specifically know it, is history. If we understand

him, it is because we know that he is contemporary society in extremis: that the
dissolution of religious foundations and conceivable futures are in him carried to
the ultimate, short of suicide.
Yet this film is not a bid for sympathy, it is an assault on those who can be
lulled by thinking that the leak is at the other end of the boat and anyway we’re
only one-quarter under water. The film says, as have many French novels and
plays, that if we concentrate on hoping for a revival of the past, we will all
drown. What we must find is another boat—and what it is, Godard presumably
doesn’t know, any more than the rest of us; but (to change metaphors) at least he
knows that it is fatal to cling to the bosom of the dead mother just because she is
not yet stone cold... .
The style is all. The first two minutes make you think this is going to be a
breezy Gallic comedy about crooks. A shapely girl-accomplice signals Michel
when to snatch the car. Then, as he speeds out alone through the country, he
sings, talks to himself, comments on the beautiful weather, finds a pistol in the
glove compartment, plays with it as he drives, going “pop!” at the sun. He is
soon cornered by a policeman and the gun does in fact go “pop,” but the actual
shooting is not much realer to Michel than the pretended one. This playful viola-
tion of the bases of civilized behavior is typical of the film.
Although it exists in an anti-conventional world and although Michel’s hero is
Humphrey Bogart, this is not a hard-boiled film. It is the epic of a romantic
outlaw, as egocentric as romantics and outlaws always are, whose life seems the
only natural one to him. It is a film of flawless consistency and uncompromised
truth. It may not be your truth, but that, of course, is not the primary point. . . .
Time

Breathless is a cubistic thriller that has an audience because half a century of

modern art and movies have rigorously educated the public eye. Filmed on the
cheap ($90,000) by an obscure, 30-year-old film critic (Jean-Luc Godard) of the
French New Wave, Breathless would seem to offer little to the average star-
struck spectator—it features a Hollywood reject (Jean Seberg) and a yam-nosed
anonymity (Jean-Paul Belmondo). What’s more, it asks the moviegoer to spend
89 minutes sitting still for a jaggedly abstract piece of visual music that is often
about as easy to watch as Schoenberg is to listen to. Then why, in the last year,
has this picture done a sellout business all over France? Belmondo explains some
of the excitement. A ferally magnetic young animal, he is now being called “the
male Bardot.” But more important than Belmondo are the film’s heart-stopping
energy and its eye-opening originality.
Breathless has no plot in the usual sense of the word. The script of the picture
was a three-page memo. Situation, dialogue, locations were improvised every
morning and shot off the cuff. By these casual means Godard has achieved a sort
of ad-lib epic, a Joycean harangue of images in which the only real continuity is
the irrational coherence of nightmare. Yet, like many nightmares, Breathless has
its crazy humor, its anarchic beauty, its night-mind meaning. . . .
. . . The hero, though such ideas are far beyond his merely physical preoc-
cupations, behaves like a personification of Gide’s acte gratuit (“‘an action moti-
vated by nothing . . . born of itself”), and his story can be seen as an extempo-
rization on the existentialist tenet that life is just one damn thing after another,
and death is the thing after that.
But Godard does not pose his philosophical questions very seriously; he seems
chiefly concerned with developing an abstract art of cinema, in which time and
space are handled as elements in a four-dimensional collage. Camera and per-
formers, moving at random and simultaneously, create the cubistic sense of
evolving relativity. Foregrounds and backgrounds engage in a characteristically
cubistic dialogue of planes. Similarly, noises and images, words and actions
conflict or collaborate in amusing, revealing or intentionally meaningless ways.
At one point the screen goes black in broad daylight while the characters go on
talking—they are really in the dark.
From Time, February 17, 1961.
196 Reviews/Time

More daringly cubistic is the manner in which Godard has assembled his
footage. Every minute or so, sometimes every few seconds, he has chopped
a few feet out of the film, patched it together again without transition. The
story can still be followed, but at each cut the film jerks ahead with a synco-
pated impatience that aptly suggests and stresses the compulsive pace of the
hero’s doomward drive. More subtly, the trick also distorts, rearranges, relativ-
izes time—much as Picasso manipulated space in Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon.
All meaningful continuity is bewildered; the hero lives, like the animal he is,
from second to second, kill to kill. A nasty brute. Godard has sent him to hell in
style.
Film Quarterly
Arlene Croce

A: qu est-ce que ‘‘la nouvelle vague’? We had begun by elimination, as

one production after another failed to bear out the notorious Cahiers tastes
(“But they don’t make that kind of film!”). Breathless shows what the
modern French version of “that kind of film’’ really looks like, and the result is
one of the most genuinely novel films of the lot. As parody, it is as subtly intellec-
tual as Kiss Me Deadly was exaggeratedly visceral; as improvisation, it is as
unified and witty as Beat the Devil was chaotic and arch; and as an example of
new-wave camp, it is a beaut. The 89 hectic minutes of Breathless, in fact,
constitute something very close to a publicity release of the whole Cahiers meta-
physic: the cult of America and the film noir américain, the theories of pure
cinema, etc. To this it specifically contributes the new celebrity, not only of what
the French press has already labeled ‘““Belmondisme,” but Sebergisme, and
Godardisme as well.
To take Godardisme first: “‘I was out to attract attention,” he recently told the
New York Times. The dedication to Monogram Pictures, like the proffered copy
of Cahiers du Cinéma that gets within camera range (yes, again), is an earnest
joke—acte gratuit combined with a bit of inside Hip. This two-ways-at-once
approach characterizes the entire film. Both ways have equal weight and are
equally serious. Breathless at once assimilates and canonizes the Monogram
tradition; that is its epochal service. It was Cocteau who said: ““The principle of
novelty becomes very difficult to recognize when our age forces us to remove
from it its usual attributes of strangeness.”’ It was also Cocteau who, with Sartre,
proclaimed Breathless “‘a masterpiece.” The principle of novelty, in Breathless,
lies in its acceptance of an exhausted genre—the Hollywood grade-B crime
film—as a simulacrum of reality. Its plot is little more than that of the quickie
digest: Footloose Killer on the Run Tangles with Double-dealing Broad as Cops
Close In—Big Paris Manhunt. These mediocre clichés are played out in the

From Film Quarterly 14 (Spring 1961): 54-56.

198 Reviews/Arlene Croce

deadpan style of an actualité, producing a dual impression of great moral wit and
intense neurotic despair. The term “‘romantic nihilism” which critics have ap-
plied to many of the New Wave films and to Breathless in particular is apt
enough. But the trouble with it is that it tends to make a genralizing cultural
analysis of what are essentially cinematic fun and games. I wonder that these
same critics do not take more notice of the far more explicit cultural analysis that
the film itself makes.
In so far as it is the perennial function of art to reveal, compare, and criticize
cultural and moral preference, Breathless accomplishes much that is necessary
for our present. Classic parallels are uncovered in the commonplace and are witty
beyond any since Cocteau’s own historic rummagings on behalf of another genera-
tion. As she appears in Breathless, the gangster’s classic nemesis (Double-dealing
Broad) would have astonished Diaghilev. The new fatal woman appears for the
first time in the unremarkable person of one of those American college girls who
wear slacks and yellow T-shirts and hawk the Herald-Tribune up and down the
Champs Elysées. The writing, casting, and playing (it is Miss Jean Seberg) of
this part, not to speak of the whole psychological conception of the character and
its function as the film’s moral focus, are of such deadly perfection that, if we
were as alert to the results of cultural export as we are to its necessity, picket lines
and reprisals from the American Legion would seem to be in order. After all,
here she was Joan of Arc.
The French love of the free-style American idiom isn’t artificial; if it reflects
local ethos and tempo in the American Age, that idiom is also fascinating in
itself. Breathless is a mannerist fantasy, cinematic jazz. Watching it, one can
hardly avoid the feeling that Godard’s intention, above all, was to produce slices
of cinema—shots, figments, iconography—what the Cahiers critics talk about.
His reality is always cinematized; the camera is always “‘there,’’ as it were, with
its short jabs or long looping rambles of celluloid. There are few dissolves and
almost no smooth cuts; and the cuts are often so fast that for moments at a time
the spectator is thoroughly dislocated. For example, the arrival of Belmondo in
Paris is shown thus: a long shot of the city / a car pulling up / Belmondo entering
a phone booth, making a call, getting no answer, leaving / Belmondo somewhere
buying a paper / Belmondo on the doorstep of a pension, with some dialogue /
Belmondo inside at the concierge’s desk and stealing a key / Belmondo emerging,
toweling, from the bathroom of the apartment. The whole truncated sequence
lasts considerably less than a minute; there are no transitions, no “continuity.”
Often there are cuts made within the same shot. No attempt is made, either
 Reviews/Arlene Croce 199

through cutting or through the long drunken pans, at academic-style montage,

composition, or meaning of any sort. It is merely movie business.
Similarly, Belmondo’s performance, appearance, and manner are a totemistic
compendium of movie-gangster busywork: the boxer’s gait, the squint, the hat-
wearing, chain-smoking, telephoning, driving, singing, shouting, mugging (in
both senses), and, of course, the classic thumb-to-lip gesture of reflection (after
Bogart, who himself appears in appreciable closeup, in a still), are all brilliantly
tabulated. Action is all. This article of faith, central to the film noir, is what has
always made the aesthetic truth of the film noir seem so shallow to American and
British critics; the identification of personality and behavior is both absolute and
rudimentary, unpardonably so. Hence, in Breathless, Michel’s “Burglars burgle,
lovers love, murderers murder . . . they can’t help it’’ becomes an exact reflection
of the crime movie’s puerile fatalism.
But it would be a shame to depend exclusively on the words in this film, good
as they are. Breathless, from beginning to end, is the total expression of its own
meaning. If action is all, spontaneity, improvisation, is the only possible style. It
is the style cultivated by Michel as an expression of impermissible masculine
virtuosity. He at least is the hero of his own life, even if his life is a cheap film
and, in the end, not worth living. Breathless sees an art form as a life-style and
vice versa; quite logically, it ends with its hero’s death.
Sebergisme is the logical destruction of Belmondisme. Patricia, the American,
irretrievably square, emotionally immobile, centerless, complacent, and uncom-
prehending, touches Michel, the Frenchman, at all those points where he is most
vulnerable. She is the triumphant actual artifact of a culture of which he, in his
delusion, is the copy, the dupe. He is the dynamo, she the void. Their long
magnificently impromptu scene together in and out of bed inaugurates a dialectic
of contemporary national manners that is almost Jamesian in its proportions.
Their mutual assimilation of each other’s backgrounds is as comically and pain-
fully incomplete as it is conscientious. After she betrays—or, more accurately—
disposes of him by calling the police, who shoot him down in the street, his bitter
and just pronouncement upon her as a human being, “Tu es dégueulasse,”’ is as
far as the film goes. No one says, “Tu es New York’; “Tu es Paris,” although it is
implied at every second. Breathless shows, with power, irony, and precision,
what great cultural convulsions have taken place in our time. Again, as of old,
the megalopolis frames the last spasm of the fleeing killer. Paris, beautiful, for
centuries dedicated to an ease of individual enterprise, was created for deaths
larger than this.
Esquire
Dwight MacDonald

fessalways had a great faith in intellectuals, and so I was not surprised when
Einstein predicted where that planet would be or when Trotsky organized the
Red Army or when Eisenstein and Pudovkin created a great cinema on the
basis of some extremely abstract ideas. But I must admit I was unprepared for
the emergence from the chrysalis of Cahiers du Cinéma, an uncompromisingly
highbrow, avant-garde and far-out Parisian magazine with the usual tiny circula-
tion, of a whole school of critics-turned-creators which would revolutionize the
French cinema. Alain Resnais (Hiroshima, mon amour) and Francois Truffaut
(The 400 Blows, Shoot the Piano Player) were the first masters to emerge. Now
they are joined by Jean-Luc Godard, who at thirty has become famous with his
first feature-length movie, Breathless (A bout de souffle). He was helped, as
should be the case with any new school in the arts, by two senior members who
had been impressed by his short films: Truffaut, who wrote the original story,
and Claude Chabrol, who supervised the production.
The story-line is familiar to the point of banality: a young bum (French, male)
steals a car, kills a cop, shacks up with another young bum (American, female) in
Paris, who finally betrays him to the police, who kill him. The point is there is no
point—cf. Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player—that things happen because other
things have happened and not because of any human volition or cunning. The
male steals the car because it was there and shoots the motorcycle cop (who was
only after him for speeding) because there chanced to be a gun in the car and
pursues the female because he has a twitch for her which obsesses him because it
is the only positive feeling he has. She turns him in because she finally decides
she must extricate herself and can’t think of any other way—though “‘decides”’ is
wrong; her behavior, and his, is as planless as the reactions of paramecia who are
bumped together or pulled apart by eddies in the culture fluid. And the police kill
him because he fires at them with a gun that has been slipped into his hand by a
well-meaning pal. It is all subhuman, without either will or feeling. There are
interesting similarities to the current “objectivist” novels of Sarraute and Robbe-

From Esquire (July 1961). Reprinted in Dwight MacDonald on Movies (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1969): 372—375.
 Reviews/Dwight MacDonald 201

Grillet, which Miss Sarraute has described as concerned only with what “might
be called ‘tropisms,’ after the biological term, because they are purely instinctive
and are caused in us by other people or by the outer world and resemble the
movements by which living organisms expand or contract under certain influ-
ences, such as light, heat and so on.”
Yet the effect of Breathless is not depressing, as one might expect, but exhila-
rating. This is partly because movies are better at “‘objectifying” than words are.
And partly because Godard has cast Jean-Paul Belmondo as the male and Jean
Seberg as the female. Both are limited as actors—I predict that his aggressive
ugliness and her torpid prettiness will become cinematic clichés—but they are
just right here. A director should use his stars as ruthlessly as a painter his colors;
he should be the subject, they the object. As Stroheim in Greed converted Zasu
Pitts from her previous comedy gray into tragic black, so Godard has used
Seberg’s blank, vapid face—the kind that has launched a thousand bad movies—
to get just the effect he wanted, which was that of a Bennington girl in Paris,
seeking thrills and a career (both on a high, or Authentic, level) but childishly
sucking her thumb in moments of crisis. A Daisy Miller of our time, the American
Dream turning into nightmare.
What is especially interesting is the original style that Godard has devised to
tell his story: jerky, discontinuous, staccato, perfectly adapted to render the con-
vulsive style of this kind of life. There are no transitions, no developments; the
montage often skips like a needle on a record. Again the resemblance to what the
French objectivists are trying to do in the novel. . . . Godard uses his camera
with the freedom of the gifted amateur who is innocent of all the conventions that
the professionals have developed to take the edge off visual reality. In Breathless
one sees the world not as it is—who knows what it “is” after all—but as an
individual with a fresh eye sees it, which is the next best thing. Belmondo’s drive
from Marseilles in the stolen car, for instance, is a lyric of freedom, full of
exuberance and humor. Its opposite, equally well done, is the long, aimless
bedroom scene, in which it becomes evident, through many small touches of
dialogue and expression, that each lover is so bound by childish ego as to be
unable to make contact with the other, that they are emotionally impotent. This is
the necessary prelude to the catastrophe.*

*When I saw Breathless a second time, in 1966, this famous scene still seemed long and pointless
by
but, alas, only that. Godard’s style was new in 1961 but by 1966 it had been imitated so much
others, and by himself, that the originality was less apparent than the new conventions its success had
that
established. The whole film had dimmed, and I was irritated —and bored—by the same artifices
first invented them. Much the same thing happened, for me, when I
had delighted me when Godard
reread the early Hemingway 35 years later (see my Against the American Grain, p. 175).
202 Reviews/Dwight MacDonald

When one adds Breathless to L’ Avventura, Hiroshima, mon amour, and Shad-
ows, I think it not premature to say that the sound film, after thirty years of
fumbling around, is beginning to develop a style of its own. This new inter-
national school varies from improvisation to stylization—the difference is not as
great as one might imagine—but it has three qualities in common: it subordinates
plot to character; it uses images and sound to suggest a mood rather than tell a
story; and it has restored montage and the camera to the dominance they had
before they were dethroned by stage dialogue in 1930.
The Times (London)

R reathless| is in the fashionable idiom, a nouvelle vague film, a produc-

tion of the Cahiers du Cinéma group. . . . It is the group’s “‘intellectual
manifesto.”” In that it preaches the doctrine of social and moral disen-
gagement, this may well be so. It is a film in the veins of which runs not the
healthy, turbulent blood of anarchy but the thin, grey fluid of nihilism.
Yet it would be a mistake to treat Breathless entirely in terms of intellectual
generalizations or to think of it as something new and revolutionary. There are
moments when it follows the classic lines (classic as the cinema understands the
term, that is) of Le Jour se léve, only in the place of the forces of conscience and
retribution that were there at work, here there is only futility, the sense of waste,
loss, purposelessness.
In that last word lies, perhaps, the clue to what it is in the film that attracts and
holds the imagination. It is not moral purposelessness that is here the issue, but
rather those random acts and words which form the patternless pattern of every-
day human existence. Scriptwriter and director are determined to break out of the
all too predictable formula which encloses in the embrace of death the average
big-scale commercial film from its opening to its closing sequence, and it is this
determination which gives Breathless its stature as a serious film.

From The Times (London), July 7, 1961.

Films and Filming
Gordon Gow

Weer A bout de souffle is like riding with an L-driver, moving in short,

compulsive jolts. The first time I saw it, a year or so back, I assumed that
the erratic editing, the deliberate disjointedness, expressed the central
character’s state of mind. Michel is a petty criminal who has entered the big-time
by killing a policeman, compulsively, and is now on the run, with stolen cars
and a fairly free American-in-Paris girlfriend. Being A bout de souffle, he is all a-
jitter. So I thought.
However, just recently I had the salutary experience of interviewing the direc-
tor, Jean-Luc Godard, and when I asked him exactly what he had in mind his
answer was that he doesn’t hold with rules and he was out to destroy accepted
conventions of filmmaking. Hiroshima, mon amour, he said, was the start of
something new, and A bout de souffle was the end of something old. He made it
on real locations and in real rooms, having no truck with studios (although more
recently he has worked in a studio and found it advantageous). He employed a
hand-camera because he is impatient and when he is ready to shoot he doesn’t
like waiting about for complicated camera setups. And having finished the shoot-
ing, he chopped it about as a manifestation of filmic anarchy, technical ico-
noclasm. He didn’t see this especially as representative of Michel’s muddled men-
tality, although he admitted that he wouldn’t have used the same technique if he
had been dealing with a level-headed character. His method seems to be largely
instinctive, with the minimum of premeditation.
Even at the second viewing, the general jerkiness of A bout de souffle retains
its power to mesmerize. It draws you in and keeps you agog. Raoul Coutard’s
flexible camera gives each shot an immediacy and fluidity, while the off-beat
editing propels attention from point to point. Like Truffaut, Godard has seen the
advantage of putting the camera in a car and the initial ride away from Marseilles
toward Paris is at first a lyrical jaunt. A jubilant Michel fires gunshots into sun-
pierced woods. With the appearance of the police, the tempo increases suddenly.
From the killing of the policeman, the picture cuts abruptly to a distant view of

From Films and Filming (August 1961).

 Reviews/Gordon Gow 205

Michel running fast across open country. Here the cutting seems far from de-
structive; creative, in fact. Elsewhere, more than once, it looks wilful; one
closeup of Jean Seberg hops hectically about the screen, a fixed shot whose
position is shifted a number of times in the editing.
Often there is a sharp sense of urgency in this kind of cutting: Jean Seberg rises
from a sidewalk table and steps toward Belmondo’s waiting car, then suddenly
they are both in the car and already it has progressed some distance along the
street. This sort of time-jump is akin to several in Hiroshima, mon amour, but
rougher, less orderly. A lively bed-romp is so jolted in the cutting-room that
when Belmondo and Jean Seberg are writhing blissfully beneath a sheet a censor
who felt inclined to trim a saucy frame or two could do so without interrupting
the rhythm.
Sentimentally, Godard closes two sequences with an iris, in homage to Griffith
perhaps. Slyly, he sets his principals walking through busy streets while pas-
sersby ignore both them and the hidden camera. Thoughtfully, he catches a
splendid vista of the Champs Elysées at the precise moment when the lights are
turned on. And far from being gimmicky, all these things merge into a form that
lifts the characters and the plot above themselves. . . .
Nowadays when enthusiasts in America as well as France are hopping hec-
tically aboard a bandwagon called nouvelle vague, and sometimes missing their
footing pretty badly, it is far too easy to claim that any departure from the
machine-tooled, glossy norm is commendable. Change in itself is no safeguard
against decay. But this extreme effort to break with cinematic conventions is one
that works well, and by the time it has arrived galvanically at its climax, and
Belmondo has taken his long death-run down a real street, observed with interest
but without much concern by passersby, the feel of tragedy is strong and the
inherent sense of Cinema is undeniable.
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 Commentaries

ne of the most talked-about éma, and Jean Carta’s in the unlikely

O films in the history of the me- forum of a Catholic weekly, Témoi-
dium, Breathless has neverthe- gnage Chrétien. Together they sug-
less been subjected to very little intense gest the range of thought about style,
analysis. Many brief reviews exist; character, and morality that the film
very few extended essays. Moreover, occasioned in its first year of exhibi-
the nature of serious film study has tion. At the end of the sixties Charles
changed dramatically in the past two Barr contributed a chapter on Breath-
and a half decades, so that, unlike re- less to an anthology on Godard put
views of the film which may disagree out by Movie magazine, the seat of
in opinion but generally share a set of British auteur studies. His essay
concerns, those essays that Breathless draws on Godard’s later films as it
has occasioned do not fit together or seeks the hidden Godardian system
maintain a dialogue. They speak at informing his first feature. Barr’s es-
cross-purposes or they do not speak say is directed at the cultured filmgoer
to each other at all. and also at university students who
To exploit the potential insights that were just then beginning to study the
makes this situation a symptom of our cinema in a scholarly way.
cultural history, I have chosen four es- The final selection is taken from
says spanning more than twenty years. Marie-Claire Ropars’s lengthy essay,
The first two appeared in the guise of “The Graphic in Filmic Writing: A bout
long reviews, Luc Moullet’s in Go- de souffle or the Erratic Alphabet,”
dard’s home journal Cahiers du Cin- which was first given (in French) as
208 Commentaries

an address to the conference on Film modern approach to films. It self-

and Textual Analysis organized by the consciously stages the tension all
American avant-garde journal Encli- films feel between what Ropars, fol-
tic. The editors of that journal imme- lowing Jacques Lacan, refers to as the
diately translated and published the realm of the “symbolic” (language,
piece in 1982. The full French version reason, signification, representation)
appeared in Littérature 46 (May 1982). and the realm of the “imaginary”
Ropars’s writing permits us to see in (force, the unconscious, drives, pri-
an instant just how far serious film mary unification). The full essay in-
discourse has traveled. The film’s geniously discovers fragments of
moral premises interest her not at all. signification scattered across the body
Characters become functions (she la- of the text in a way that is both dream-
bels them ““M” and “‘F,”’ as in alge- like and perversely ludic. For ex-
bra) of an enterprise of representation. ample, the sounds of the French title
Nor does she find that enterprise to be A bout de souffle remind her not only
related to the personal expression of of the way we say the alphabet (A, B,
the director as Charles Barr had. In- C, D) but also of the title of the Mau-
stead, Breathless becomes a contested rice Sachs novel Michel picks up at
site where male and female functions the end of the film, Abracadabra.
contend via images, sounds, and writ- The question of intentionality, of
ing. The dissociation of images and Godard’s awareness of this maze of
sounds (particularly in the sequence in (partial) meaning, is irrelevant to her,
the Napoléon theater) allows her to as it is to most current theorists. Sig-
bring to bear on this film the vocabu- nification, in cinema as in writing,
lary of Jacques Derrida, of which she has its own reason and effects.
is a master. Cinematic “writing” cuts In its technique of attending to
through the text in innumerable ways: minute details of possible significa-
visible words, spoken words, the tion, and in its goal of not just under-
break between signs and what they standing but of participating in a
signify, the way some signs refer to project of cultural writing, Ropars’s
other signs, and so on. Reproduced essay is at the forefront of modern
here is the least theoretical portion criticism in the arts. That Breathless
of a remarkable essay. is a film to sustain such discourse so
Breathless is not only extremely long after its appearance testifies to its
amenable to this sort of study, it is complexity and its allure. We shall have
itself one of the guideposts that has more articles on Breathless, of that I
led to such a poststructural, post- am sure.
 Jean-Luc Godard
Luc Moullet

T= first of the many innovations of Breathless is the conception of its char-

a cters. Godard did not follow a very precise line in painting them, but rather
he consciously worked out a series of contradictory directions. Godard is an
instinctive creator, and rather than logic per se (which he used in his first timid
attempts, which he was too lazy or not interested enough to follow), he follows
the logic of his instinct. He explains this in Charlotte et son Jules:
I seem not to care what I say,
But that’s not true at all. Not that.
From the mere fact that I say a sentence,
There is necessarily a connection with what precedes.
Don’t be bewildered,
It’s Cartesian logic.
But yes,
That is exactly how I speak in the theater.
A film is not written or shot during the approximate six months allotted it, but
during the thirty or forty years that precede its conception. When the filmmaker
types the first word of his script on the typewriter, he only has to know how to let
himself go entirely—to let himself be absorbed in a passive labor. He need only
be conscious of himself at each moment. That is why Godard doesn’t always
know why a certain character does this or that. But after thinking a little, he
always discovers why. Certainly one can always manage to explain even a contra-
dictory behavior. But with Godard it is different: thanks especially to the accu-
mulation of small details, that Godard imagined naturally by using himself as his
subject, everything manages to hold together. The psychology is more effective
because it is freer and almost invisible.
Our two heroes have a moral attitude new to the cinema. The decline of Chris-
tianity since the end of the last century (Godard, of Protestant origin, is very
conscious of this) left man free to choose between the Christian conception of a
relative human existence and the modern worship of the individual. Each choice
From Cahiers du Cinéma, April 1960. Translated by Roberta Bernstein in Jean-Luc Godard, ed.
Toby Mussman (New York: Dutton, 1968). Amended by Dudley Andrew.
210 Commentaries/Luc Moullet

has its good aspects, and our heroes, feeling a little lost, oscillate between one
and the other. Because of this the film is marked with the seal of the greatest of
philosophical schools—the Sophists.
Breathless (like Euripides’s plays) is an attempt to surpass Sophism by adapt-
ing it to reality; from this, happiness can result. Belmondo says to Charlotte [in
Charlotte et son Jules—translator’s note]:

I’m not upset with you, yes, I am upset,

No, I’m not upset with you, I mean I am, yes,
Upset with you. I don’t know.
It’s funny, I don’t know.
I’m upset with you for not being upset with you.
And Patricia says:
I don’t know if Iam free because I am unhappy or unhappy because I am free.
Partly because she loves Michel, Patricia denounces him; partly because of the
novelty involved and to have the last word, Michel wants to give himself up to the
police. The changing attitudes of our times can sometimes determine a complete
reversal of conventional psychology to its exact opposite. One of the results of
this perpetual changing is the accomplishment of the mise-en-scéne, usually
found in all great films, since the authors of them are also directors. Our heroes,
fascinated by the madness of their behavior, detach themselves from themselves.
They play with their detached selves in order to see what this will yield. The last
scene is filled with supreme irony: Michel before dying makes one of his favorite
comic faces and Patricia responds. Thus the ending is both optimistic and heart-
rending—heartrending by the intrusion of the comic into the core of the tragic.
Critics have already remarked upon the differences between the behavior of the
male and the female. . . . Patricia is a little American intellectual who doesn’t
really know what she wants and ends up informing against the man she loves. She
is full of radiance and constant jabbering, with an astonishing lucidity through her
childishness. But like Charlotte, her character is much less appealing than the
masculine character. Could Godard be a misogynist? No, because this dislike of
women is only external and limited to the subject alone. It reflects the contradic-
tion at the basis of true love of man for woman: the more relative admiration of
amused contempt of those who, in the encounter of reason and taste, prefer man
to woman. Certain filmmakers who want their films to be ‘“‘the work of a man who
loves women, who says it, and who shows it” are really the misogynists. They
 Commentaries/Luc Moullet 211

give women the advantage by choice of external subject; they hire the most
beautiful actresses, but they don’t direct them or they direct them poorly because
they don’t know how to reveal their essential qualities. Always this ambivalence
between what is and what one wants to be: “‘I am not what I am,” said Shake-
speare. Whereas the association of Godard and Seberg yielded magnificent re-
sults, undoubtedly because in Seberg we find that dialectic so dear to Godard.
With her seemingly masculine life-style and boyish haircuts, she is all the more
feminine. As is well known, a woman is sexier in pants and short hair because
these permit her to purify her femininity of all superficial elements.
Patricia, however, becomes more admirable when she telephones the police. It
is an act of courage. She decides to get out of the terrible intricacy in which she
is entangled. But like all acts of courage it is a facile solution. Michel reproaches
her bitterly for it since he can assume complete control of his character and play
the game; he doesn’t like Faulkner nor halfway things and he follows his perpetual
dilemma all the way to the end. But he plays the game too well: his death is the
natural sanction called for by logic, the spectator, and morality all at once. He
went too far: he wanted to set himself apart from the world and the things in it in
order to dominate them.
It is here that Godard detaches himself very slightly from his heroes (whom he
otherwise sticks to literally), thanks to his cruel and entomological second per-
sonality of the objective filmmaker. Godard is Michel, yet he isn’t, since he is
neither murderer nor deceased. Why this superiority of author over character that
bothers me slightly? Because Michel is only virtually the double of Godard: he
makes actual what Godard thinks. A scene like the one where Michel lifts the
Parisian girls’ skirts shows this difference well. Certainly the cinema begins or
ends with psychoanalysis, but when the filmmaker is conscious of the oddities of
his soul and their vanities, they can become a source of beauty. Breathless is an
attempted liberation. Godard is not—is no longer—Michel because he made
Breathless and Michel did not.
Notice that the form of the film is always in the image of the hero’s behavior as
seen by the heroine; even better, she justifies this behavior. Michel, and to a
greater extent Patricia, is overriden by the disorder of our times and by the
perpetual moral and physical developments and changes peculiar to our era
alone. They are victims of disorder and the film is thus a point of view on dis-
order—both internal and external. Like Hiroshima and 400 Blows, it is a more
or less successful effort to dominate this disorder; actually a rather less than
successful effort since if it had been successful, disorder would no longer exist. If
212 Commentaries/Luc Moullet

a film about disorder becomes disorderly itself, it must, I think, be condemned

for that reason. What is most admirable in 400 Blows is that the disorder fully
resolves itself by means of order, thanks to the detachment of Truffaut and the
perfect ending of the final sequence; and that Truffaut is a young man and an old
man of about seventy at the same time. But there is a little more illegitimate
trickery there than sincerity: the artist can only be one person at the moment he
is making the film; also all evolution in the heart of the work, whether at the
beginning or the ending, is a forced affectation. In this regard Godard is superior
to Truffaut: while Truffaut with an applied effort forces the civilization of our
times into a classical framework, Godard, more honest, searches to justify our
epoch from within itself.
According to some people, order in art is valid, disorder is invalid. I don’t think
this is true since the uniqueness of art is that it is bound by no laws. Even the
respect of the public for art is a myth which should at times be denounced. The
mise-en-scéne recreates the impression of disorder by two different voices,
as Godard always does, by naturalness, freedom, and boldness of invention.
Godard takes all that he perceives in life without selecting; more exactly he
selects all that he sees and only sees what he wants. He omits nothing and tries
simply to show what signifies all that he sees or that passes through his head.
Incessant, natural disruptions of tone create the impression of disorder. It is not
at all necessary to be shocked at the sudden shift from Faulkner to Jean of Letraz,
during a love scene.
Likewise, when Godard makes a play on words, whether good or bad, we
laugh because of his intentional banality. Godard shows us the profound unity
which results from disorder, from permanent and external diversity. Some critics
have said that the film and its characters do not evolve, except in the last half
hour, and even then only slightly. But this is because Godard is against the idea of
evolution. The same is true of Resnais, who arrives at the same conclusion, but
by the totally opposed means of a tightly constructed work. This conception is in
the air in our times: the camera is a mirror led along a path, but there is no longer
a path. Like Hiroshima, Breathless could last two hours, and it lasted effectively
for two hours at the first editing. The very remarkable Time Without Pity (Joseph
Losey, 1957) shows a very precise construction and a constant progression, but it
all seems arbitrary somehow. Godard follows the superior order of nature—the
order in which things present themselves to his eyes or his mind. As Godard said:
‘From the mere fact that I say a sentence there is necessarily a connection with
what precedes.”
 Commentaries/Luc Moullet 213

The film is a series of sketches, of interludes unrelated at first sight, like the
interview of the writer. But from the mere fact that these episodes exist they have
a profound relation to each other, like all phenomena of life. Parvulesco’s inter-
view clearly poses the problems our lovers must resolve. Like Astrophel and
Stella (Sir Philip Sidney, 1581), Breathless is formed out of little isolated circles
which are rejoined by identical hinges at the end of each sequence or sonnet: with
Sidney it is Stella, with Godard Patricia or something else. The nature of the
effect doesn’t matter, but each scene must have an effect—that is realism... .
. . . Godard observes reality meticulously, but at the same time he tries to
recompose it by means of flagrant artificialities. All novices, fearing the hazards
of shooting, have a tendency to plan out their films carefully beforehand and to
make grand stylistic configurations. For example, in Charlotte we find a scien-
tific usage of extended scenes, as with Lang. This explains the style of editing in
Breathless, where the flash cutting alternates with the very long scenes in an
intelligently conceived manner. Since the characters’ conduct reflects a series of
mistaken moral junctures, the film will be a series of mistaken junctures. Only
how beautiful and delicious are these mistakes!
But, in fact, the systematic, simple expression of the subject in script, shoot-
ing, editing, and angle shots is exactly what is least new in the film. It is not
particularly clever to shoot a tilt shot every time a character falls down. Aldrich,
Berthomieu, and Clément did it all their lives and it is rarely effective. All
the same, this method works when in the same pan shot we jump from Seberg
and Belmondo on the Champs Elysées to Belmondo and Seberg on the same
Champs, walking by the shadows of De Gaulle and Eisenhower who are march-
ing past. This shot means that the only thing that matters is yourself, not the
exterior political and social life. By cutting out the scenes where our generals
appear, the censors reduced the generals to mere entities, to ridiculous puppets:
what will remain of our times is Breathless, not De Gaulle nor Eisenhower,
pitiable but necessary figures as are all statesmen. This method is also effective
when, very differently from that of Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1957) and The Cousins
(Chabrol, 1958), the camera of the great Coutard films rolls on and on, and at the
same rate as the soul of the hero. That has precise meaning. It is the classic
expression of modern behavior.
With Godard, spontaneity prevails over formula, completing and recapitulat-
ing it. This makes for the slight superiority of Breathless over Hiroshima, where
Resnais is concerned with spontaneity only in directing the actors. Another supe-
rior feature of Godard is that he only deals with concrete things. Remembrance,
214 Commentaries/Luc Moullet

forgetfulness, memory, and time are things which are not concrete; they do not
exist and like Christian didacticism or communism they are not serious enough
to be treated by a language as profound as that of the screen. . . .
. . .Godard. . . makes us admit that this modern universe—metallic and terri-
fying like science fiction—is a marvelous universe full of beauty; a universe mag-
nificently represented by Jean Seberg, less vivacious here than with Preminger,
but more lunar in the decomposition of her existence. Godard is a man who lives
with his times. He shows the utmost respect for the landmarks of uniquely mod-
ern civilization, e.g., automobiles, the comic strips of France-Soir. The civiliza-
tion of our times is not the rightist, reactionary one of L’ Express or the plays of
Sartre, characterized by sullen intellectualism and the rejection of the realities of
modern life; rather it is the leftist, revolutionary civilization represented among
other things by these famous comics.
That is why it would be wrong to associate Godard with Rousseau under the
pretext that they are the greatest Franco-Swiss artists. If Jean-Jacques offered us
nature against artificiality, Jean-Luc claims back the city and the artificialities of
modern civilization 100 percent. Following the American tradition (in the best
sense of the word) of Whitman, Sandburg, Vidor, and even Hawks, he has ac-
complished the highest mission of art: he has reconciled man with his own times
and with this world, which so many constipated bureaucrats—often in too poor a
position to judge, knowing nothing else —take for a world in crisis that crucifies
man. As if man were no longer capable of understanding himself in a world
which seems to menace him. For Godard the twentieth century is not an enor-
mous affront facing the creative man; it is enough to know how to see and ad-
mire. The power and beauty of his mise-en-scéne, imposing an image of serenity
and optimism, enables us to discover the profound grace of this world, terrifying
at first contact, through its poetry of mistaken junctures and perdition.
On Breathless
Jean Carta

reathless, the first full-length film by Cahiers du Cinéma critic, Jean-Luc

Godard, is a work at once complacent and provocative, artful and sincere,
which bears witness to an authentic revolt against the hypocrisies of our
epoch at the same time as it portrays a moral anarchy that leaves one perplexed
about the intentions of the author, about his ideas and his myths.
One certainty, in any case: he is a true cinéaste: the film’s tone is as modern as
have been the other recent products of the new generation. The dialogue and the
compositions combine to give us exactly the sentiment of the world in which we
live now in 1960. The way the director has integrated into his narrative real
events (Eisenhower’s visit) and certain aspects of contemporary technology (neon
signs, the photo of the hero in France-Soir) increases the impression of veracity.
The dialogue, written with a tremendous liberty, contributes to the realism of the
whole.
Surely you would applaud it without reserve, this very spontaneous dialogue,
if it weren’t spoiled by a number of crass appeals to the audience that are disap-
pointing, at least at first glance.
Just as we applaud the dialogue despite its dross, we admire a mise-en-scéne
that is so full of vivacity and rhythm and that owes less to French cinema than to
the numerous ancestors in Hollywood whom Godard venerates. As effective and
free as is this mise-en-scéne, as a matter of fact we must admit—in opposition to
certain flatterers—that it situates itself at the crossroads of various traditions and
that there is nothing here that is absolutely new or which revolutionizes the lan-
guage of the screen. On one point, however, it does permit us to note the extraor-
dinary evolution of cinematographic grammar in the last few years: Breathless
marks the end of the sacrosanct “‘continuity of action.”” When, in a classic film,
you want to move from one shot to the next, you strive to tie the two moments via
a connecting gesture. Let’s say it’s a man drinking in a café. Establishing shot: he
lifts his beer; closeup: he puts it back down. The spectator, carried along by the
logic of this action, doesn’t doubt for an instant that the character he saw at the

From Témoignage Chrétien, April 8, 1960. Translated by Dudley Andrew and Dory O’Brien.
216 Commentaries/Jean Carta

back of the café is the same as the one who now appears in a head-and-shoulders
shot, putting down his glass. He thus acquires the sense that he is certainly
witnessing a single scene, only taken from a different angle, rather than a differ-
ent scene. . . . This rule, which requires that shots follow one another in a logi-
cal sequence (except for the technical separation of sequences by fade outs,
irises, etc.) has been under fire for quite a while by a more and more elliptical
cinema: the man has barely lifted his glass when in the following shot he has
already put it back down. Thus Resnais in Hiroshima had definitively knocked
over the principle of continuity because he didn’t hesitate to join, in the very same
sequence, the objective with the subjective, the past with the present, the hero-
ine’s distant memories of Nevers with the life she was living right now in
Hiroshima.
Now Godard doesn’t go this far. Still he violates, and with evident pleasure, the
golden rules of his profession, notably in the excellent sequence in the bedroom
where it is constantly necessary to make an internal adjustment so as to explain
how Belmondo can leave the bathroom when we are sure he’s in bed. More than
this—and this is what’s crucial—it seems that the refusal of logical continuity
prolongs the imaginary duration of the film. As soon as there is no longer a
coherent connection between shots, we restore this logic: we interpolate between
two images that fit badly together the invisible shot that reconciles them: we saw
Belmondo in bed; we see him coming out of the bathroom: in our minds a third
shot slips between these two, one where Belmondo goes from the bed to the
bathroom. We have added to the film a few imaginary seconds, thus prolonging
its duration.
Sartre reportedly said of Breathless, “It’s very beautiful.’’ I have not heard
with my own ears this terse judgment, but we ought to be astonished that such a
prolific philosopher could only come up with this naive formula to describe such
an ambiguous and complex film by Jean-Luc Godard.
What does it recount, this story? The unhappy idyll of a killer, half hoodlum
and half child, with an American student, the few hours they spend together
before the police bring the young murderer down. “‘All the tension of Breathless,”
writes René Guyonnet, in L’ Express, “resides in the futile effort made by Michel
and Patricia to reunite, to find each other, to understand one another.”’ It seems to
me that he has misunderstood and that the film is much more likely constructed
on a Manichean opposition between the two characters in which the first, Bel-
mondo, is in effect utterly intent upon understanding the other; but in which the
other, Jean Seberg, slips away and, for her part, refuses to give over her precious
 Commentaries/Jean Carta 217

personality to a love without bounds, without escape, total. In love as in friend-

ship Belmondo insists upon the necessity of the absolute: one must go to the end,
beyond laws and social structures, unless one is a ‘““coward.”” And Seberg in fact
will turn out to be a coward, not because she fears the laws and the police—she
scoffs at them several times over—but because she does not want to lose her
liberty, because her concept of independence prevents her from abandoning or
forgetting herself and from giving herself, ultimately forbidding passionate love.
Belmondo would like to see her break all her ties with her life to follow him to
Italy. It is that which she refuses, the great leap to the other side of rationality.
The failure of the couple becomes concrete in the denouement when each partner
speaks in monologue without hearing what the other is saying.
Of these two portraits, executed with equal success, one an absolute tempera-
ment and the other its opposite, both served by remarkable acting, it is perhaps
Jean Seberg’s that is the more fascinating. Godard has admirably traced this type
of narcissistic psychology that begins with physical complacence (“Do you think
[this Renoir] is prettier than I am?” “Do you like most my eyes, my mouth, or
my shoulders?’’), a complacence that also expresses itself in front of the mirror,
in the photos tacked up on the wall, only partly hidden by a false sartorial sim-
plicity: a narcissism that is pursued on the intellectual plane—as we see the
heroine ruminate over her problems, analyze herself, question herself about her
happiness, her destiny, without ever understanding that her life will never find the
significance that she searches for in vain until she projects it toward others; a
narcissism, finally, that inexorably emerges in the most hideous form of egoism,
when the Other becomes nothing more than a pretext, the instrument of one’s
personal vibrations, a means of titillating oneself, of making oneself feel good or
bad, with no interest in the self of the Other, in his very existence. Seberg
reaches this extremity when she turns Belmondo over to the police. She didn’t
want to fall in love and hadn’t found a better way to break off. She is here no more
than a praying mantis, destroying the destiny of a man who loves her, for the sole
purpose of protecting herself from her own temptations.
One can gauge the abyss that separates this romantic conception of the couple,
for which Belmondo is the real symbol, from that epicurian conception that we
see in the recent [New Wave] films of Pierre Kast or Jacques Doniol-Valcroze.
Here the hero is not satisfied by merely epidermic contact. All that a Kast char-
acter can dream of, Belmondo obtained from Seberg. But he asks of her a real
passion and not simply a night. This ‘hoodlum’ has amorous requirements to
which the “intellectuals” of Kast’s film, Le Bel Age, do not have access. You can
218 Commentaries/Jean Carta

feel in Godard a visible recoiling before those beings who mix emancipation with
a dullness of heart. This is the type of person that he thrashes in the character of
the French-American journalist for whom sexual relationships are a mere pas-
time, a gesture of professional sympathy toward women, whereas by contrast,
for Belmondo the failure of love justifies death. A sentence from Faulkner, cited
by Seberg, announces the end of the drama: “Between grief and nothing I will
take grief . . .”” to which Belmondo hurls back that he chooses death because
grief is a compromise. And in fact it certainly is death that he will choose in
refusing to flee.
A violent protest against contemporary hypocrisy, a brutal demand for the
right to do anything and to crush all in order to live in full contact with the
absolute: this is what touches us in Godard’s film. But this is also what we can
dispute. Between the rejection of mediocrity and modern mendacity and the
rejection of all social necessity there is a distinction that the auteur does not seem
to make. He stands with his hero against all order, against all society because it
limits the expression of an exceptional personality. Before such “intellectual an-
archy,”’ which crops up also in his statements, we have mentioned how uncom-
fortable we feel at the uncritical exaltation he bestows on this antisocial charac-
ter. Now any method is worthwhile that succeeds in making a criminal into a
human being for us, upending our usual perspective and making us identify
a hidden despair in the impetuous act of a young murderer. Society would
guillotine him and think it had done with him. But this scenario is not new to
the cinema: look at Chicago Nights [Underworld] by Sternberg (1927). It
abounds in the American cinema, most notably in the character of Humphrey
Bogart (Wyler’s Dead End, 1937, for example), and you see it in the French
school of the thirties in the character of [Jean] Gabin. But here Godard won’t at
all try to explicate his character’s conduct. He does exactly the opposite. He
posits the fatal act as a sort of incident or abstraction, as if no one had really
pulled the trigger. Then he moves on from this “regrettable action” in order to
weave a long psychological plot between two characters in a dramatic situation.
The murder is put in parentheses, conjured out of existence. It is only a pretext,
in the same way that the hatred of Clytemnestra is a pretext bringing about the
bloody plot of Orestes. It may seem that an action this fatal ought to have its own
weight. However hardened one may be—and Belmondo is not a professional
criminal—to have on one’s conscience the corpse of an innocent man should lead
one to think pretty deeply. But in the description we get of this sympathetic and
unhappy fellow, the murder (along with a number of other scenes: thefts of cars,
 Commentaries/Jean Carta 219

wallets, etc.) becomes a rather picturesque element in a folktale. It loses its

tragic aspect to become a mannerism of behavior, a bad habit, a simple incon-
siderateness, one of his character traits. In this fashion [Godard] presents Bel-
mondo on the one hand as a pitiable human being while on the other his shooting
of the cop has left not a single trace on him. This is where the contradiction lies,
transforming the touching young man into a disturbing killer. How are we sup-
posed to sympathize with and admire this character for whom the life of another
doesn’t count? He loves, we are told, and is not loved in return. Isn’t this sad? The
sympathies of the author are directed at him. He doesn’t urge us to excuse him,
but rather to find in him a true grandeur which is missing in our sordid epoch. In
making the cop’s body evaporate, [Godard] suggests to us in the name of I don’t
know what kind of haughty Nietzscheism, that the death of a man is not very
important, that it is quickly forgotten as a means of full self-realization, when
one is aiming at the absolute.
But by means of an apparent contradiction that ensconces itself in the very
heart of the character and contributes to its authentic rendering, Belmondo is
also haunted by a contrary feeling: this same man who is presented to us as ready
for anything, if it means that he can reach the peak of passion, is gnawed by a
fatigue, a taste for death which he expresses at several points and which explains
his rootlessness, his “‘exile’’ in the midst of a society from which the absolute and
love have been banished, where money rules, where no one invites him to find a
place. This notion engenders a fatalism, a refusal to consider the world as ca-
pable of being changed: “It’s normal: informers inform, burglars burgle, lovers
love.” Life is this way and no one can change it. And when, by misfortune, one
has ideas of the absolute in one’s head, it is better to lie down and die.
Beyond its incontestable cinematographic mastery, the message of Breathless,
intentional or not, is anarchism, Nietzscheism, fatalism: to reject all. But it also
reveals in its creator, under the gloss of self-assurance and of paradox, a false
“lucidity,” which is endearing because it bears witness to a disillusioned love of
the world and to a poorly effaced confusion.
A Bout de Souffle
Charles Barr

odard himself makes a brief appearance in A bout de souffle. He plays the

man who first points out Michel to the police.
Both Michel and Godard are wearing dark glasses. Godard peers out
from behind a newspaper (in which he has seen Michel’s photograph) as Michel
did in the first shot of the film. He walks very obviously in front of Michel’s
stationary car, comparing the face with the photo, yet Michel doesn’t notice him.
In a way, this implausibility is just a sign of Godard’s indifference to surface
naturalism, like the passersby who stare at the camera in the street scenes and the
passersby who don’t stare when Michel is dying. This convention he extends into
a method of analysis, detaching people from the external world in order to study
them more clearly. Bruno in Le Petit Soldat, hesitating whether to kill the man he
has been ordered to, drives his car level with that of his target, aims the gun, and
continues alongside, ‘frozen’; yet the man never looks at him. On a naturalistic
level this is ridiculous, but what might otherwise seem a rather suspect device, a
shortcut, is justified by its aptness to Bruno’s dreamlike state of mind. Like-
wise the scene from A bout de souffle is not simply a cartoonlike compression of
the action, but a sign of Michel’s indifference to danger, amounting to a self-
destructive urge; it seems almost as if it were Michel himself acting as informer.
This is valid whether or not one recognizes Godard playing the part. The scene
takes on a greater resonance when one reflects that Godard, the creator of
Michel, is intervening in his story, guiding it toward its end. He intervenes quite
arbitrarily; wanders around, like a director on set. It is Godard who points out
Michel to the police (like a director giving instructions) at the moment that he
drives away—as if, for story purposes, calculating to let him get just out of
immediate range. The iris-out on Godard which ends the sequence—a deliberate
archaic device, used once earlier—again reminds us of the director’s hand. The
scene is a concentration of the devices by which, here and in later films, Godard
reminds us that he is putting together the story for us. Objections to the ar-
bitrariness of his endings are undercut by this emphasis on the convention, on the

From Jean-Luc Godard, ed. lan Cameron (New York: Crown, 1969).
 Commentaries/Charles Barr 221

fact that we are watching a film. At one moment in the love scene of Alphaville,
Lemmy and Natasha look out at us like two stars posing for a publicity picture
(compare that of Bogart which Michel confronts in A bout de souffle), and Godard
illuminates their faces alternately as though preparing to light a shot. The subse-
quent happy ending in Alphaville, ridiculed by some critics, is consciously a
‘film’ happy ending, a sort of wish-fulfillment: though Godard makes us aware
that he is imposing it willfully, it is nevertheless organic in that Lemmy is per-
suading Natasha to behave like a heroine—to live up to the conventions of ‘leg-
end.’ Similarly at the end of A bout de souffle, the arrival of Antonio with a gun
for Michel, at the same time as the police, is arbitrary. Michel refuses to escape
or to take the gun; Antonio throws it directly into his path. It seems to be an
image of an external fate intervening, yet Michel’s act of picking up the gun,
which causes the police to shoot, is a free acceptance of this fate. Moreover, he
has already chosen his fate, ultimately, by staying with Patricia instead of leaving
Paris. As Lemmy emulates one kind of film star, Michel emulates another:
Godard the storyteller provides the ending which each invites. This sort of inter-
dependence between will and fate is nothing new in drama; what is modern is the
characters’ self-consciousness about their roles, and the sophisticated attitude of
author and audience to the patterns of ‘legend.’
The contradictions of Godard’s own appearance—a narrative scene but a di-
rector’s intervention; an arbitrary intervention yet one at which Michel seems to
connive—are central to the film, and foreshadow his later films.
At the risk of seeming to load more on to this scene than it can take, I want to
suggest a further association. There is a strong tradition that Shakespeare in
Hamlet acted the part of the ghost—the figure of an ‘objective’ morality pressing
in upon the confused individual whom he has created. It is almost as though he
had poured so much of himself uncritically into Hamlet that he had symbolically
to get outside him. Shakespeare ‘is’ both Hamlet and the ghost; Godard ‘is’ both
Michel and the informer (the follower of official morality). Both confrontations,
and both works, give an odd sense of an author’s private debate or experiment,
which is not yet fully resolved in dramatic terms. This whole parallel could be
extended much further. The standard revenge play is behind Shakespeare as the
gangster film is behind Godard. The theatrical references in Hamlet have a range
and function similar to the cinematic ones in Godard’s films. Hamlet himself,
with his intellectual jargon, travel, paradoxes, practical jokes, self-dramatization,
world-weariness, obsession with death, and, not least, his ambivalence toward
women, is the type of a Godard hero (Michel, Bruno in Le Petit Soldat, Ferdinand
222 Commentaries/Charles Barr

in Pierrot le fou). The tension between contemplation and action, and between
ideal and real, are recurrent Godard themes, notably in Pierrot le fou. Such
parallels are not superficial, and one may be more able to grasp the orientation of
A bout de souffle (particularly in the context of Godard’s later films) if one sees
that Godard’s relation to Michel is something like Shakespeare’s to Hamlet. In
this film Godard’s concern is, like Shakespeare’s, to sort out, from a confronta-
tion between rebellion and rigidity within a closed society, some stable values, as
well as a more meaningful dramatic pattern to work with subsequently.
Obviously Shakespeare in Hamlet gets much further. A bout de souffle is only
the start of the Hamlet which Godard is still making. (One suspects that Godard’s
view of the modern world would prevent him from producing anything that is
more serene than Hamlet.) Though there is a strong continuity with his later
films, A bout de souffle is a tentative work.
Michel’s shooting of the policeman, near the start, is presented in a remote,
stylized way: closeup of Michel’s gun, a rather beautiful longish shot of the
policeman (whose face we don’t see) falling back into some bushes, long shot of
Michel running away across a field. Then he is in Paris. This abruptness conveys
how he is able to shut himself off from any feeling of shock. His other actions,
stealing cars and money, are done and shown in the same casual manner. Borne
along in exhilaration by the film, one can easily slip into identifying too easily
with Michel, his freedom and ‘honesty.’ But freedom from what? The context of
his actions is very thin; his impulses lack an ‘objective correlative.’ In case this
seems a stale and irrelevant criterion, it is worth considering how firmly in his
later work Godard supplies just this, relating the main action to a politically and
socially turbulent world by which the characters are oppressed. In Pierrot le fou
not only is there the continual weight of reference to, for instance, Vietnam, but
the oppressive social milieu which Pierrot flees is presented with a sharpness
which colors the whole of the action that follows. Alphaville presents the same
world in a diagrammatic form, a world where emotion is eliminated or pros-
tituted and where violence is normal. Lemmy’s first killing, of the man in the
bedroom, is done in the same stylized way as Michel’s, and his subsequent vio-
lence is similarly casual, but the moral overtones are quite different. Nor is it
conclusive to argue that Lemmy is one sort of hero, Michel another, and that they
meet appropriately different ends: the distinction exists, but the links between the
two men are strong also.
The films have in common the theme of imagination versus logic. Michel
trying to get Patricia to Rome is like Lemmy taking Natasha to the Outerlands.
 Commentaries/Charles Barr 223

Patricia is committed to society and its values: she must work at the Sorbonne,
take her chances as a journalist, etc. Early on she asks Michel, when he mentions
horoscopes, “‘Qu’est-ce que c’ est l horoscope?” Her French isn’t too good, but
this is hardly a difficult word . . . the exchange is schematized to set Patricia’s
blankness against Michel’s concern with the future, which he goes on to explain.
Her failure of verbal understanding stands for a failure of moral understanding.
Her vision doesn’t extend beyond the present (she can’t respond to his impulse to
go to Rome). Likewise her final question, “‘Qu’est-ce que c’ est dégueulasse?”’ ,
followed by her abrupt turning away, implies the lack of a whole moral dimen-
sion: her betrayal ‘means’ nothing to her. The challenge to her of Michel’s per-
sonality resembles the data with which Lemmy confronts Alpha-60; she tries to
cope by using logic, and the results are disastrous.
In this sense Michel stands for love and vision (it is clear where Godard’s own
sympathies lie) but he does so only in a pathetically tenuous and compromised
way. This in itself doesn’t make the film incoherent—it is the pattern of many
gangster films—but it is notable that Godard doesn’t use this pattern again: his
films since A bout de souffle have shown intelligent men reacting violently
against their environment to seek love and freedom (Bruno, Lemmy, Ferdinand,
and Pierrot), or, sometimes, brutish heroes (those of Les Carabiniers, Arthur in
Bande a part) whose conditioning by society is acutely analyzed. Michel was an
awkward mixture. A hero coming from nowhere; a pattern of questioning, from
the POURQUOI spelt out in cigarette packets on a bedroom wall, through all
Patricia’s questions to the final line; a dead end. It is the only Godard film which
seems at all vulnerable to the charge that his deep concern about civilization is
something read into his films by admirers who, in Raymond Durgnat’s words,
‘impregnate his blandness with their pain.” The final impression is of a tentative
film, a ‘run through’ of ideas, characters, and styles which Godard is testing in
action, fitting together in a slightly makeshift way: his own brief appearance to
guide the action can be seen, in retrospect, as a sort of cryptogram admitting
this. Clearly Godard learnt a lot simply from the act of making this film, whose
relation to his later work is hinted at by the opening words of Bruno’s narration in
Le Petit Soldat: “The time for action is past. I have grown older. The time for
reflection has come.”
The Graphic in
Filmic Writing
Marie-Claire Ropars

arie-Claire Ropars begins her analysis she breaks the film into a
long essay by alluding to dozen sequence units and she identi-
Jacques Derrida and his insis- fies the characters as M (male) and F
tence that the hieroglyphic nature of (female). Punctuation marks, such as
writing takes precedence over the the iris, the fade out, and the dis-
phonetic, and that we should think of solve, mainly determine the units.
language literally as a material pro- The most important moment of the
duction of concepts made by physical film for her occurs when “‘the cinema
inscription. With this in mind, she itself is named,” when Patricia and
dares to approach Breathless for the Michel (F and M) go to see a western.
actual written signs found within it, To get to that moment she begins to
and beyond these, for its own work in notice all those moments when the
dissociating image and word. Thus cinema, as a concept and institution,
the film is shown to contain texts and intrudes into the film as a text.
to function as a text. To begin her

. . . Let’s go back to where cinema first intrudes into the film. An enunciative
break, occurring in sequence 4,' just after Michel and Patricia meet, attracts our
attention first; whereas M and F’s long stroll was filmed in one shot, the separa-
tion of the two protagonists starts a brutal modification of the frame (high angle
shot and long shot), sustained musically and immediately followed, in a dy-
namic, nondiegetic cut, by a short return to M passing in front of a poster which
he doesn’t look at, but which is shown by the camera: it is of an American film
starring Jeff Chandler. At the end of sequence 4, when Michel has escaped from
the police, another poster stands out behind him, and this time he stops to look at
'Ropars breaks the film into twelve sequences: sequence 1 corresponds to shots 1—12; sequence 2,
13-49; sequence 3, 50-73; sequence 4, 74—94; sequence 5, 95-123; sequence 6, 124—212; se-
quence 7, 213-256; sequence 8, 257—271; sequence 9, 272—314; sequence 10, shot 315; sequence
11, 316-372; and sequence 12, 373—407. Each sequence ends with an emphatic form of filmic
punctuation: a dissolve, a fade, or an iris out. Note that sequence 10, to which Ropars gives so much
importance in this essay, is the only single-shot sequence in the film.—Ed.
From Enclitic 6 (Fall 1981/Winter 1982).
 Commentaries/Marie-Claire Ropars 225

it: it too shows an American film, but starring Bogart, whose photo M contem-
plates in shot/reverse shot. The sequence concludes right there with an iris-out
and -in, encircling the two policemen who are chasing M.
More and more insistently, cinema penetrates the film’s fabric. The old-
fashioned punctuation, which temporarily closes off this infiltration, also em-
phasizes what kind of circuit is involved: detective films, actor’s films, action
films—a classic production model lines Michel’s path, as if to nostalgically re-
flect its framework. Born in America, this kind of cinema is relayed into France:
right after the first poster, M suddenly encounters a girl who tries to sell him, or
rather shows him Cahiers du Cinéma, well-known for its auteur principle, espe-
cially for auteurs from across the Atlantic. Beyond the historical wink, which
dates Godard’s first feature film referentially, we can note the system taking
shape: posters, photos, magazines; the cinema comes in here as a distribution
process, for which the face-off with Bogart indicates what is at stake, before
the outdated punctuation, removed from its object, can drive it out. The re-
peated shot/reverse shot editing plays with alternating the closeups of two faces,
Michel’s and the actor’s. During this double exchange, M removes his dark
glasses and his cigarette, then runs his thumb over his lips murmuring Bogart’s
name, or rather his nickname “Bogey.”’ There could hardly be a better way of
designating the mechanisms of scopic projection to which the cinema invites us:
the thumb movement, borrowed from Bogart, specifies M’s face right from the
first shot of the film, and accompanies him all along his run; the name murmured
here, and the substitution of the faces, inscribe one of the dominant functions of
the cinematographic apparatus: to propose the image as a place of identification
for the subject. Specular image, wholly imaginary identification: Bogart’s face is
bare, with neither hat nor cigarette, Michel is only partly bared. The actor doesn’t
look like M, but like his friend Tolmatchoff whom Michel has just left; the
resemblance escapes the one who is mimicking it, the image of the double slips
away, but the identity doesn’t. Cinematographic language, clearly marked off
here, is staged in its illusory dimension: to identify Bogart, while identifying
with him.
Sequence 10 means to get away from the illusion, which is taken apart in the
end of sequence 4, by interposing another form: no diachronic editing, thus no
exchange between a look and that which is looked at; and especially no coinci-
dence between name and image, between representation and signification. M and
F went to see a western, but their faces in closeup take the heroes’ place on the
screen, while the flickering light seems to transform their kiss into a screen on
which a deferred projection, with far-off images, would leave its trace. As for the
226 Commentaries/Marie-Claire Ropars

text murmured off, it also contains an echo of the western: ““Be careful Jessica,”
begins the man’s voice; ‘“‘You’re making a mistake, Sheriff,’ continues the woman’s
voice further on; but as you can see in the dialogue to shot 315, this echo can be
found scattered over two poems, one by Aragon (“On the edge of kisses,” the
man’s voice will carry on) and the other by Apollinaire (“Our story is noble and
tragic,” the woman’s voice will continue). Diverted in this way, the western only
intervenes to divert the present image in its turn, by pulling it toward a space
outside, which is both absent and penetrating, which empties the representation
of its presence; and the double voices, rooted in the image by means of their
masculine and feminine sonorities, sustained semantically by the figuration of
the kiss they prolong, cannot, however, merge into the faces they accompany: the
sheriff lies in wait for these voices, but they are caught up in a poetic network of
assonance, homonymy or homophony (trop vite, évite, tragique, magique, pa-
thétique), and they make the signs opaque by making them glide from one text to
the other. Inner voices perhaps, but foreign to M and F’s language; outer voices,
thus, but with no roots nor future in either of the two films. Voice-offs, to be sure,
but for a brief moment, the off itself is doubtful.
So two semiotic phenomena converge in this short passage: instability of the
image, both representation and support, film and screen, fiction and cinema;
disconnection of the voices, parted from what it designates, torn apart by two
equally impossible references. The divergence of the figurative and linguistic
network stems from the relativity of their disjunction: a play of traces and cross-
references, the text is directed at an image which comes undone under the pres-
sure of another image itself reflected in the text; the editing circuit, having be-
come reversible, sets up an open system of refusal between figure and sign.
Refusal of illusion, refusal of signification as well—both equally inscribed in
the cinematographic model displayed throughout sequence 4: aren’t the Cahiers
[Notebooks] du Cinéma also the cinema-turned-notebook, the book spread open,
offered in the place of vision? Let’s come back to the occurrences of American
films. The first poster, the one that follows the encounter with F, offers only
graphic inscriptions: “Vivre dangereusement jusqu’au bout—les productions
Hammer Films présentent Jeff Chandler” (“Live dangerously right to the end—
Hammer Film Productions present Jeff Chandler”). No picture here, except in
the typography; only a written phrase, a play of signs. Just after the poster and
the Cahiers du Cinéma, a sign bearing the abbreviation ‘““Roneo” (Mimeo) ap-
pears at the top of a shop-window, under which an injured scooter-rider drops
dead. Sign of the cross—M keeps going by, opens his newspaper, finds in it that
 Commentaries/Marie-Claire Ropars 227

“the police have already identified the RN7 murderer.” Written word, printing
works, press—from the cinema to the newspaper, signs are linked by death to
formulate the identity, the actor’s, the murderer’s. But the article headline, which
can be read in closeup on the screen, is illustrated by a photo of the two motorcycle
cops and not of M; the identification, both inquisitory and scripturary, seems
foiled by the missing image—the cinema’s last resort against the sign? This im-
age—imaginary—is what the second poster offers as a delusion, with Bogart’s
photo taken from the ads by the camera and substituted for M’s face. In spite of
the subtraction done by the editing, the images remain generated in the space of
the sign from which they try to escape: “‘ Plus dure sera la chute—cette semaine”
(“The Harder They Fall—this week”’ ); if Bogart’s name is not on the poster, the
decipherable title responds to the call of the first written title “Live dangerously
right to the end.” Both designate the film we are watching, predict its outcome.
Delayed, diverted, M’s face finally gets framed by the image; his identity is
revealed, albeit through the breakdown of the deceptive mechanism on which it is
based.
The cinema in its double semiological dimension is introduced starting in
sequence 4: analogical figuration, and linguistic signification, written before
being spoken. One of them—the analogical—brings identification into play in
the imaginary; the other—the sign—draws identity over to death’s side. The two
systems remain separate, and are distributed between the two occurrences; but—
system of signs or system of images, they are both equally rooted in the represen-
tation; when written, a word is perceived, immobilized in a sentence like the
photos which revolve around it; it too represents, albeit by substitution. Flattened
out, frozen in exemplary decomposition of its components, the cinema is placed
under the sign’s symbolic law, whether the sign be abstract or figurative. Deprived
of speech, but engendering it (““Bogey”’), it intervenes here as language, with all
the clues linked to the imaginary and to death which lie in wait for the subject
chased by meaning; and to involve writing, with sequence 10, it will have to
decenter the sign in the voice, which temporarily cracks open the question of the
subject, by obliterating that of identity. So the display of the cinematographic
apparatus doubles the fiction, holding up mirrors to it in which its mechanism of
illusion and the deadly force which drives it will be reflected in mirror construc-
tion. The precipitation of the filmic writing disturbs the markers that punctuate
this fiction, by crossing out the system of signification into which it has
settled 5...
. . . Warded off, the graphic sign still returns, both desirable and prohibited:
228 Commentaries/Marie-Claire Ropars

could this be because at first it is printed on the female body? This question leads
to a new circuit: . . . When she emerges through M’s seeing her on the Champs
Elysées, Patricia, who is holding a pile of newspapers, is yelling ““New York
Herald Tribune,”’ but she is also wearing a T-shirt with the breast-level inscrip-
tion, front and back, of the newspaper’s lettered title. Two readings are possible,
constituting F in this film: Patricia is fundamentally connected to the press and
the novel, which multiply the death signals directed at M; her voice only repeats
what is already written: redundancy, therefore, and deadly monotony. But also—
why not?—Patricia is joined to the letter and writing, just like the shapely girl in
sequence 3 who lived in a room covered with letters. Despite Patricia’s noticeable
love of quotations, we cannot exclude the second reading. For Patricia’s favored
status is to be, to the letter, the film’s foreigner, the equivocal American (girl or
car?) bearing equivocality and an Italian last name, who introduces a foreign
accent into the language, making the words opaque again. . . . The ambiguity of
writing persists with the oralization triggered by Patricia. She can spread mean-
ing as well as short-circuit it, and appears in turn as the body-turned-sign and the
sign embodied, exerting a force of attraction mixed with repulsion: both letter
and literature, writing and culture; an androgynous figure, who doubles for
Michel, in the double sense of the term: because she gives him away (in French
doubler) to the police, and because with his props (hat, cigarette, dark glasses in
the beginning of sequence 5) she takes on his role as protagonist with a whole
sequence for herself (7), and his function as subject, master of vision and of the
viewer’s interpellation (12). The desire whose ambiguous object she is thus seems
inseparable from a dispossession of identity for the one who desires her, M,
sought in vain by a multitude of male doubles, but who will stumble and die at
the feet of a female double.
Structural more than formal, the distinctive feature of this double will first be
to take over in the fiction; opposite the male hero, who is tired, overcome with
the imaginary, the substitution of a female agent is asserted in the last sequence,
who guarantees the return of law and order with her call to the police: at the
moment of firing, the policemen are arranged in such a way that they form the
symbolic figure of a triangle in the shot; the final race alternates between M seen
from behind, running away, and F face-on running as if to chase him down; and
the editing of his death, which continues to separate M lying in the pedestrian
crossing and F standing up in front of him, grants the prerogative of point-of-
view to F alone: a high-angle shot of M, but no low-angle shot of F. Far from
erasing the border between the symbolic and the imaginary, the film seems to try
 Commentaries/Marie-Claire Ropars 229

rooting it in a victory of the female over the male. But the takeover is also turned
in the reverse direction: in the last shot, once M’s eyes are closed, F turns around
to face the camera and passes her thumb over her lips, thus also taking back from
M the gesture borrowed from Bogart, and, more importantly, the cinemato-
graphic function the film increasingly reflects: a function of imaginary identifica-
tion, certainly, but we have seen how full of writing it was.
Contradictory takeover, therefore, in which the female figure hesitates be-
tween the fiction and the film, constituting a subject and decentering the viewing
subject, who is appealed to directly in this last shot: “Qu’est-ce que c’est, dé-
gueulasse?”’ (What does “lousy”? mean?). Just as M, in sequence 2, confused the
point of view, speaking sometimes to the viewer and sometimes to himself. But
the scriptural interchangeability of M and F is only sketched out here, and the
film stops right when this is brought up. Too many sociological indications
strictly split up the male and the female in the course of the fiction, divide the
sexes into men and women, as inscribed in a division of the signs themselves into
“ladies” and “gentlemen’’: this is at least how it is written on the movie theater
restrooms where Patricia flees before getting back to Michel.
The cinematographic world is indeed entered by way of a descent into the
restrooms at the end of sequence 9. That is where Patricia, holed up in a Champs
Elysées cinema, escapes from the policeman who followed her to the basement
and who strays into the ““Gents”’ while she is getting out the “Ladies” window.
False entry, thus, into a cinema where the graphic tracing of the sign which says
sex is on the watch. So it has to be left behind—before being entered again; but
this time to approach the purely vocal space of sequence 10. One last time here
we are back at the exchange of male and female voices, texts by Aragon and by
Apollinaire, in the darkness of a kiss one shot long. What distinguishes this unit
from the other eleven is precisely that it is limited to one shot, projecting the act of
editing into the verticality only of the writing. A singular shot, as single as the
long tracking shot in which M and F’s encounter took place; a single space, like
the bedroom in sequence 6 tried to be in vain. The erotic activity—hidden under
the sheets during this sequence—is displaced in this shot, which offers an image
of the near union of the male and the female, and in the voice-offs their denied
disjunction, their poetic equivalency... .
The union which is realized in the image only masks the division maintained in
the voices. The diachronic editing works on this division at the beginning (start
of 1) and the end (end of 12) of the film when it alternates the implementation of
a male figure (f in the beginning and F at the end) without connecting them: in
230 Commentaries/Marie-Claire Ropars

both cases, man and woman remain apart like the shots that are repeated in two
disconnected series, communicating from afar, with gestures or looks, in delayed
continuity. Separation of the sexes, attraction factor; attraction of the editing,
factor of writing, that is, first of tension, relative discord, reactivated dissolution:
the editing consists of this never-filled gap, of this current which both approaches
and displaces what it intends to reconnect. But the tension can always be broken,
linearity established, writing rooted in the separation into shots, into signs, into
archetypal sexes. Masculine/Feminine, Ladies/Gents—the text is inscribed
underground, and we know what Lacan has made of this. So the editing has to
regress into verticality—and this is the effort Godard’s film makes—where writ-
ing breathes into the voice, and the voice into the sign, to try to ward off that
which, in the sign’s differential structure, marks off sexual difference. And there
is always a risk, as we have seen, of a return to a distinction between the sexes,
which has not been challenged because of the fiction’s stability.
“Méfie-toi, Jessica” (Be careful, Jessica); méfie-toi de Jessica (Be careful of
Jessica). In the erotization of writing a kind of feminization is on the watch,
whose emblematic figure is suggested in the film’s first shot: a closeup of a news-
paper spread open; in the middle of the newspaper, on the length of a page, the
outline of a woman, enticing in her short skirt, with a doll in her hand; on either
side, comic strips with captions. Piercing the newspaper, off and anonymous, a
male voice can be heard; the newspaper is lowered showing its name as it goes
by—Paris-Flirt; and Belmondo-M’s face appears with all his character’s props—
hat, cigarette, thumb movement across his lips. Of the various readings permit-
ted by this single shot, whose editing is synchronic at first, we will only mention
the sociological profile of an uncultured hero who reads scandal sheets. But we
can stress the strange complex, which delays the intervention of the cinemato-
graphic image by substituting a cinegraphic image of mixed figures and signs;
and which, in the same suspense, conceals the male face behind the print of a
female sketch which acts as a mask. Two paths, whose networks are entangled,
open before us. One, symbolic, has to do with outlines: f must be erased for M to
emerge, but the trace of F stays on the edge of a film which, as we have seen,
organizes the substitution of a female subject. The other, semiotic, concerns
layout: there can be no cinema without the originary dissociation of voice and
image, hidden from each other; no analogical image, without drawing and letter
together to give it form originarily. At the opening of the film, the hieroglyph
extends a polymorphous blazon, mixing up languages, and scrambling codes;
writing’s blazon, but it is stretched over a female body—derisive as it may be—
 Commentaries/Marie-Claire Ropars 231

which screens male speech. If the latter breaks through, the male face taking
shape will finish off the collapse into representation that was merely delayed,
edited in a manner prompted by the separation of the elements.
The movement which lowers the newspaper also turns down the female blazon
just as Michel turns down the young women and leaves alone at the end of the
first sequence. Is it by accident that the téte-a-téte with himself in sequence 2
again take the form of an editing that moves apart—voice-off/voice-in of M
divided from himself? Crossing the line, with the explosion of continuity and the
inversion of pan shots, killing the policeman, with the simultaneous rupture of
image and sound, show the transgression of the law at stake which is repeated in
the editing: society’s law, of course, unknown rather than contested; but first the
law of the division of the sexes, perpetuated right down to the refusal of the other
sex. A law that cannot be bypassed, here, because it is instituted in the equivoca-
tion of writing, in which the hieroglyphic inspiration is still permeated with
exactly what it challenges; in A bout de souffle, the contradiction between sign
and letter, consubstantial with the graphic component as well as with the female
element onto which it is projected, reveals a contradiction between the fiction,
with its sexual models, and the writing, into which desire shifts the difference.
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Filmography and
Bibliography
 Godard Filmography,
1954—1985

1954 Opération béton (short subject) 1959 A bout de souffle (Breathless)

Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard. Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard,
based on an original treatment by
1955 Une Femme coquette (short
Francois Truffaut.
subject)
Screenplay by Hans Lucas [Jean-Luc 1960 Le Petit Soldat (The Little
Godard], based on a short story by Soldier)
Guy de Maupassant, Le Signe (The Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard.
Signal).
1960-61 Une Femme est une femme
1957 Tous les garcons s’ appellent (A Woman Is a Woman)
Patrick (All the Boys Are Called Pat- Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard,
rick, short subject) based on an idea by Geneviéve Cluny.
Screenplay by Eric Rohmer.
1961 ‘‘La Paresse”’ (‘‘Sloth’’), an
1957-58 Une Histoire d’ eau (short episode in the Les Sept Péches capi-
subject) taux (The Seven Capital Sins)
Screenplay by Francois Truffaut, nar- Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard.
ration by Jean-Luc Godard. 1962 Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live)
1958 Charlotte et son Jules (Char- Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard,
lotte and Her Jules, short subject) based on a book by Judge Marcel
Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard.
236 Filmography, 1954-1985

Sacotte, Ou en est la prostitution? 1964 La (Une) Femme mariée (The

(Paris: Buchet-Castel). [A] Married Woman)
Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard.
1962 ‘Le Nouveau Monde” (“The
New World”’), an episode in 1965 Alphaville; ou, Une Etrange
RoGoPaG Aventure de Lemmy Caution (Alpha-
Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard. ville)
Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard.
1962-63 Les Carabiniers (The
Riflemen; The Soldiers) 1965 Pierrot le fou
Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard,
Gruault, and Roberto Rossellini, based on a novel by Lionel White,
based on a play by Benjamin Joppolo, Obsession; published in France as Le
I Carabinieri, adapted for the French Demon de onze heures in the “Serie
stage by Jacques Audiberti. Noire”’ (Gallimard).

1963 “Le Grand Escroc,” an epi- 1965 Masculin/Féminin (Masculine/

sode in Les Plus Belles Escroqueries Feminine)
du monde (The Beautiful Swindlers) Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard,
Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard. freely based on two novellas by Guy
de Maupassant, La Femme de Paul
1963 Le Mépris (Contempt)
and Le Signe; plays by LeRoi Jones
Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard,
(Dutchman); and Jean Vauthier (Les
based on a novel by Alberto Moravia,
Prodiges).
Il Disprezzo (A Ghost at Noon).
1966 Made in U.S.A.
1963-64 ‘“Montparnasse-Leval-
Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard,
lois,” an episode in Paris vu par. . .
based on a novel by Richard Stark,
(Six in Paris)
The Juggler; published in France as
Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard,
Rien dans le coffre in “Serie Noire”
based on an anecdote told by Bel-
(Gallimard).
mondo in Une Femme est une femme
from Les Contes de lundi by Jean 1966 Deux ou trois choses que je
Giraudoux. sais d’elle (Two or Three Things I
Know about Her)
1964 Bande a part (Band of
Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard,
Outsiders)
based on articles by Catherine
Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard,
Vimenet, ‘“‘La Prostitution dans les
based on a novel by Delores and
grands ensembles,’’ La Nouvel Obser-
B. Hitchens, Fool’s Gold.
vateur, 29 March and 10 May 1966.
 Filmography, 1954-1985 237

1966 ‘Anticipation; ou, L’Amour en 1968 One Plus One (One Plus One,
l’an 2000” (“‘Anticipation”’),an epi- Sympathy for the Devil)
sode in Le Plus Vieux Métier du Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard.
monde (The Oldest Profession)
Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard. 1969 British Sounds (See You at
Mao)
1967 La Chinoise; ou, Plutét a la Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard.
chinoise (La Chinoise)
1969 Pravda
Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard, based
Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard,
on (probably) Paul Nizan’s La Conspi-
based on Brecht’s play, Me-ti, and on
ration (Paris: Gallimard, 1939).
writings of Mao Tse-tung.
1966-67 “Caméra-Oeil,” an epi-
1969 Vent d’ est (Wind from the
sode in Loin du Viet-Nam (Far from
East)
Vietnam)
Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard,
Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Jean-Pierre
1967 “L’Amour,” an episode in La Gorin, Gianni Barcelloni, and Sergio
Contestation; Italian release title Bazzini.
Amore e rabbia (Love and Rage)
1969 Lotte in Italia/Luttes en Italie
Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard.
(Struggles in Italy)
1967 Le Week-End (Weekend) Screenplay by Dziga Vertov Group
Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard. (probably Jean-Pierre Gorin), based
on Louis Althusser’s concept of ide-
1967-68 La Gai Savoir
ology, published in 1960 and later
Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard, based
translated as “Ideology and Ideologi-
loosely on Rousseau’s Emile; the title
cal State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and
is a translation of Nietzsche’s Die
Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster
Frohliche Wissenschaft.
(New York: Monthly Review Press,
1968 Cinétracts (short uncredited, 1971).
unedited newsreels)
1970 Vladimir et Rosa (Vladimir
1968 Un Film comme les autres and Rosa)
(A Film Like Any Other) Production: Dziga Vertov Group
Production: Dziga Vertov Group
1971-72 Tout va bien (Just Great)
[Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin]
Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard and
1968 One A.M. Jean-Pierre Gorin, based on Jean
Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard and Saint-Geours’s Vive la société de con-
D. A. Pennebaker somation (manager’s monologue);
238 Filmography, 1954-1985

CGT Magazine, La Vie ouvriére 1980 Sauve qui peut (La Vie) (Every-
(union official’s monologue); ““Mao- man for Himself )
ist” magazine, La Cause du peuple Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard.
(leftist worker’s monologue).
1982 Passion
1972 Lettre a Jane/Letter to Jane Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard.
Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard.
1983 Prénom Carmen (First Name
1975 Numéro deux Carmen)
Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard and Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard.
Anne-Marie Miéville.
1984 Je vous salue Marie (Hail
1970—76 Ici et ailleurs (Here and Mary)
Elsewhere) Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard,
based loosely on the Gospel of
1976 Comment ca va? (How’s It
St. Luke.
Going?)
Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard and 1985 Détective
Anne-Marie Miéville. Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard.
1977 Sur et sous la communication 1987 King Lear
(Over and Under Communication; six Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard.
TV programs)
Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard and
Anne-Marie Miéville.
 Selected
Bibliography

Godard, Jean-Luc. Godard on Godard. Editions de Etoile, 1986. (This

Edited by Tom Milne. New York: 640-page tome contains virtually
Viking, 1972. (The best English- all of Godard’s writings on the
language source of writings by cinema.)
Godard up through 1968, fastidi- Lesage, Julia. Jean-Luc Godard: A
ously annotated.) Guide to References and Resources.
Godard, Jean-Luc. /ntroduction a une Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979. (Indis-
véritable histoire du cinéma. Paris: pensible as a tool and an introduc-
Albatros, 1980. (Transcription of tion to Godard’s work. This guide
an extended interview in Montreal. has served as the basis for the pre-
Godard discusses his ideas about ceding filmography and for the
film after consecutive screenings of “‘Cast and Credits.” It annotates
many of his films and of films he over 2,000 writings about Godard,
requested to see.) including 136 on Breathless. The
Godard, Jean-Luc. Jean-Luc Godard reader is urged to consult this guide
par Jean-Luc Godard. Paris: Edi- for further information.)
tions Balfond, Cahiers du Cinéma,
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Film

“An intelligent and invaluable case study on Godard’s first feature film.”
— Film Study

“A most salutary tribute to the Swiss-born director’s creative spirit and technical
expertise . . . a rich collection of materials.”
— French Review

Breathless, a low-budget film, came to be regarded as one of the major accom-

plishments of the French New Wave cinema of the early sixties. It had a tremen-
dous influence on French filmmakers and on world cinema in general. Beyond its
significance in film history, it was also a film of considerable cultural impact.
Young students and film enthusiasts today continue to try to outdo one another
in their Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg imitations, just as Belmondo himself
in the film had rendered his own version of Bogart and Gabin. In Breathless, Jean-
Luc Godard captured the spirit of a disillusioned generation and fashioned a style,
which drew on the past, to parade that disillusionment.
In his introduction, Dudley Andrew brilliantly explains what Godard set out to
accomplish in Breathless. He illuminates the intertextual and cultural references of
the film and the tensions within it between tradition and innovation. This volume
also features, for the first time in English, the complete and accurate continuity
script of Breathless, together with Francois Truffaut’s surprisingly detailed original
treatment. Also included are an in-depth selection of reviews and criticism in
French and English; a brief biographical sketch of the director’s life that covers the
development of his career, as well as a filmography and selected bibliography.

Dudley Andrew is Angelo Bertocci Professor of Critical Studies and Director of

the Institute for Cinema and Culture at the University of Iowa. He is the author of
Concepts in Film Theory, André Bazin, Film in the Aura of Art, and other books
on film.

Rutgers University Press ISBN 0-8135-1253-0

ck, New Jersey
(MIM 90000

Cover Photo: Courtesy of the Museum

of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive 780813°512